


r!Animorphs: The Reckoning

by WhatWouldEnderDo



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Rationalist, rational
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-11 13:10:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 44
Words: 315,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5627803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhatWouldEnderDo/pseuds/WhatWouldEnderDo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU/multiple points of departure, with the intent to fix/sane-itize/create internal consistency, allowing rational agents to take things to the extreme. Visser Three is competent, the Yeerks are moving rapidly, and the Animorphs are actually trying to win (but are inexperienced and unprepared). Inspired by Worm and HPMOR.</p><p>Written Megamorphs style (cycling between viewpoint characters with each chapter).  Thus far, there have been two complete "books" composed of a full rotation of chapters.  Estimated final length is somewhere between five and fifteen books (35 and 100 chapters).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 01: Jake**

<Come inside, please—all of you. And quickly.>

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tobias start forward, saw him jerk to a stop as Marco’s hand seized his shoulder. I heard Cassie’s soft, terrified gasp, somehow seeming every bit as loud as Rachel’s wild, unbalanced laughter. I felt the crawling tingle of adrenaline flooding my veins, and the tight, breaking-point tension of muscles that didn’t know whether to freeze or flee. The alien ship filled my vision as the voice filled my thoughts, both of them impossible to believe, impossible to ignore.

There was a shout, a muffled thud, a _whoosh_ of air, and I tore my eyes away to see Marco doubling over as Tobias stepped back, his fists clenched. Without a word, he whirled, running toward the ship, toward the ramp and the open hatch above.

<No.>

Tobias froze in mid-step as if the word had been a magic spell, balanced on the toes of one foot, his clothes and hair like carved marble. Behind him, Marco straightened on puppet strings, still coughing and wheezing as some invisible force drew him upright and held him there. I fought back a wave of nausea as Rachel’s laughter lifted another octave, as Cassie’s frightened whimpers cracked and gave way to open sobbing.

_Move!_ I shouted at myself. _Run! Scream! Do SOMETHING._

But what?

It was a spaceship.

A _spaceship,_ in the middle of the construction site, where seconds earlier there had been nothing but dusty foundations casting shadows in the moonlight.

What was there to do?

<There will be peace between you,> the impossible voice said again, and I realized with a blood-freezing chill that it was _my_ voice—not some unfamiliar mental interruption, but _my own inner voice,_ the words sounding exactly the same inside my head as they would have if I’d thought them myself.

Whatever was talking to us, it was hijacking our own brains to do it.

<There _must_ be peace between you, > it continued. <You must come together, all of you, or those you leave behind will be lost forever, and you soon after.>

I looked at Tobias, whose eyes were wide and frightened, his nostrils flaring as he struggled within his unseen restraints. I looked at Marco, whose face was a mirror of my own, his jaw clenched with fear and doubt and indecision. I looked at Rachel, who had choked on her laughter and now stood silent and horrified, a hand over her mouth. I looked at Cassie, at the tears that were streaming down her cheeks and disappearing into the dust at her feet.

I looked at them, and they looked at me.

I’m not psychic, you know. I’m not one of those guys who believes in past lives or déjà vu, or who writes down his dreams and thinks he knows what they mean. Up to that point, I’d never even really _thought_ about the future, much less tried to predict it. And even now, if you ask me, I’ll tell you that I don’t really believe in fate, in destiny.

But I swear, in that moment, when the four of them looked to me, I got some kind of a glimpse of what was coming. I think that’s what snapped me out of it, what finally got me moving. Because _not_ moving, _not_ reacting, standing there and letting things just happen—that’s a choice too, you know?

I stepped forward, half-expecting to meet resistance, overwhelmed with relief when I found none. “Why?” I asked, staring up at the ship. I didn’t shout. Somehow, I knew it wasn’t necessary.

<An enemy approaches,> said the voice in my head. <I have delayed it, for now. There are two-to-the-forty-ninth decoys scattered across this hemisphere, and its methods of falsifying them are slow. But our conversation must begin, for we are close to the obvious target, and luck may favor evil as easily as good.>

I couldn’t help it. I shivered. Something about hearing the word _evil_ echoing through your mind, put there by someone else, a thought transplanted against your will. I looked over at Marco again, saw him staring back at me, saw him shake his head slowly in the darkness. I knew what he was thinking. _You don’t ever get in the car with the kidnapper, man. No matter how bad it is, it’s only going to get worse once you give them home field advantage._

<I am no kidnapper, Jake Berenson.>

My head snapped back toward the ship so fast that my neck cracked. A low, hopeless groan crawled its way out of Rachel’s throat, and I felt sudden warmth in my hand as Cassie stepped forward and laced our fingers together.

“Then why do we have to come inside?” I asked. “Why don’t you come out here?”

<Because I am dying.>

 

*        *        *

 

“The closest word would be _morphing_ , I think. Shapeshifting would seem to be too broad, since you can’t take the form of anything that is itself incapable of moving or sensing its environment, nor anything that lacks some kind of a genetic map.”

He stood with his back to us, using words that I might have understood if they’d come half as quickly, or if my brain weren’t already stunned and punch-drunk. He was moving as he spoke, his hands darting back and forth across a control panel the size of a dinner table, his eyes tracking dozens of strange symbols as they cast their soft blue light onto his skin.

His _human_ skin.

“It is done with nanotechnology, in response to focused thought, in a process too complicated to explain. Imagine your body being disassembled and stored in an alternate dimension, while a new body is built from scratch in its place, controlled via a mental link. This is a lie, but a useful one—the new body will respond as if it is your own, will _feel_ as if it is your own.”

He didn’t look like he was dying, didn’t _sound_ like he was dying. But—he’d said—appearances could be deceiving.

“You will witness arms becoming wings, eyes becoming antennae, skin becoming scales. For a time, you will _be_ the other organism. Your true body remains unchanged—sent elsewhere, its processes suspended.”

I shook my head, struggling to understand, fighting to make the pieces click and painfully aware that _think harder_ wasn’t exactly a strategy.

“You expand the library of available morphs through manual acquisition. Simply touch the organism you wish to become, focusing your thoughts in a particular way, and the system will begin its analysis. The first analysis will take hours, but given the shared ancestry of life on this planet, subsequent acquisitions will be usable within minutes or seconds.”

We were huddled together on what seemed to be the bridge of the spaceship—a vast, cavernous space filled with panels and instruments, shining in a blue glow that cast no shadows, as if it were emerging from the walls themselves. There were kiosks and consoles arranged in a wide arc around the central viewscreen where the alien now stood. Half of the consoles were burnt, blackened and misshapen, wrenched away from the large, ragged hole that had removed most of the far wall. If it weren’t for the curled, springy grass carpeting the floor, the whole thing could have been a set from the next _Star Trek_ movie.

I still held Cassie’s hand in mine, the two of us gripping tighter and tighter as sweat made our palms and fingers slick. At some point, my other hand had found Marco’s, just as Cassie had reached out to Rachel. It was embarrassing, childish, but no one had said anything. We were all too frightened to care. Even Tobias had grabbed hold at first, taking Rachel’s other hand as the pair of them led us up the ramp. But he’d let go once we reached the bridge and was now standing slightly apart, his eyes locked on the alien as his hands slid back and forth across the consoles, stroking them the way you might pet a sleeping cat.

_Vivid._

It wasn’t exactly a thought. Just a word, floating up from English vocab. It attached itself to Tobias like a bookmark—a feeling, a question, a vague sense that there was something there I’d want to come back to, later. I was afraid. Cassie was afraid. Even Marco and Rachel were afraid. But Tobias … Tobias was something else. Deep below the surface, some part of my brain logged it, flagged it, grouped it together with three or four other things and started looking for the pattern.

There had been another moment—outside, when the invisible bonds holding Tobias and Marco had loosened, leaving both boys standing on their own two feet.

“We have to go inside,” Tobias had said, turning to face the rest of us, a painful urgency threatening to crack his voice.

“Like hell,” Marco had shot back. “I can think of a hundred reasons not to, and half of them don’t even involve probes.”

Beside me, Rachel had stirred, shaking her head as if trying to clear her thoughts. “This—is real?” she’d asked quietly, speaking to no one in particular. “This is really happening?”

No one had answered her. “It’s a _spaceship_ , Marco,” Tobias had pleaded. “This is the most important thing that’s ever happened.”

“So take a picture with your phone, send it to the cops, and let’s get _out_ of here.”

“It’s dying. What if it needs our help?”

“It _says_ it’s dying. And even if it is, that’s not _our_ problem. You can go right inside and catch space AIDS, but I’ve got no interest in getting abducted.”

He’d turned to go. Again, I’d felt my thoughts skidding, my mouth hanging open as I struggled to find the right words to say—

“Marco, wait!” Cassie had shouted.

We’d all turned to look at her, Marco included. Cassie, the whisperer, the quiet one. Cassie who never shouted, ever. I’d squeezed her hand, trying to offer support, or reassurance, or _something_ , I wasn’t entirely sure what and probably neither was she. She’d gulped, her jaw trembling, and continued. “It’s just that—it said—it said all of us, right? We all have to go together, or—or else—”

<Or else all of you will die.>

I’d cleared my throat. “Why should we believe you?”

<What would you say, Jake Berenson, if I told you I had seen your future?>

“Bullshit,” Marco had said, without hesitation.

There’d been an amused rumble, the memory of a giant’s laughter. <If I wished you harm, Marco Levy, do you think that you would still breathe? Do you think I need lies to strike you down? I do not even need weapons—if I but hold you for an hour, my enemy will do the rest. What I am offering is _help_ —help you desperately need, help that I cannot give unless you come inside. Make your choice—trust and live, or doubt and die.>

After that, there hadn’t been much more to say. Just another one of those moments, when all four of them had looked at me, as if they somehow needed _me_ to give the order. And so we’d climbed the ramp, and stepped through the door, which had thankfully stayed open behind us. And there, in the graceful, organic hallways, holding hands like kindergarteners, we’d seen the wounds that had been hidden in the darkness of the construction site—the shattered bulkheads, melted consoles, scorched turf.

It was clear that there had been a battle.

It was clear that the alien had lost.

On the bridge, he entered a final sequence of commands, studied the viewscreen for a long moment, and nodded tightly, an uncannily _human_ gesture.

Marco noticed, too. “You’ve been on Earth before.”

The alien—the man—turned to face us, and nodded again. “Yes. I spent several years in human form, in fact. It is—not unpleasant, to wear this body once more before the end.”

I glanced around the bridge, at the alien grass, the domed ceiling, the consoles just a little too tall for comfortable human use. “What do you look like normally?” I asked.

“You will see soon enough, Jake Berenson. But we have sadder matters to discuss, and only minutes to discuss them, for all my skill and subterfuge. Before we proceed, there is one question you must answer, as honestly as possible.” He paused, and I felt the hands gripping mine tighten further, Marco’s no less than Cassie’s. “Human children, what deeds would you do—what burdens would you shoulder—how far would you go, if the fate of your species hung in the balance?”

 

*        *        *

 

A part of my brain that I hadn’t ever noticed before had awakened, was working overtime, pouring new information into the stream of my thoughts as quickly as it could generate it. I saw my friends’ faces, heard their voices, felt a kind of strange certainty as predictions began making themselves without any help from me.

_Rachel: Whatever it takes. Just say the word, and I’m there._

_Cassie: Just_ our _species? Just humans? What about everything else?_

_Marco: Why are you asking_ us? _We’re_ kids _, in case you hadn’t noticed._

_Tobias: In the balance of what?_

_Jake:_

I frowned. That wasn’t how brains were supposed to work—was it? Why couldn’t I predict what _I_ would say?

“I think you’ve got the wrong guys, Mr. Alien,” Marco quipped. “We’re barely even teenagers; we probably couldn’t get two miles on foot before curfew.”

The alien said nothing, only shifted his gaze, waiting.

“Are you asking us to leave Earth?” Cassie said, her voice shaking. “Is there—is something going to happen, and you can only save a few people? Only humans?”

Another pause, another shift.

“If there’s a fight, I’m in,” Rachel said, her voice suddenly strong and confident.

Shift.

“What is it?” Tobias asked. “What deeds, what burdens, what fate?”

Shift.

I felt a chill run down my spine, felt cold sweat break out on my forehead. Those eyes—there was something about them, something deep and dark and inscrutable, hiding just beneath the surface. Even if we’d met on the street, I’d have known they weren’t merely human.

I took a deep breath. “You said we have only minutes?” I asked.

“Perhaps as many as forty. Perhaps as few as twenty.”

I turned to look at my friends, searching their faces for understanding, for permission, for forgiveness. Tobias’s expression was a wild mix of hope and despair, Rachel’s a grim mask of determination, Cassie’s a tear-stained portrait of uncertainty.

What did mine look like?

I locked eyes with Marco, who bit his lip and glanced significantly at the ragged hole, at the bright points of starlight just barely visible through the gleam of headlights on the highway. I could see the wheels in his head turning, could imagine his thoughts with an unnerving degree of confidence.

_Tick tock,_ Marco was thinking. _Tick tock._

I turned back to the alien. “It’s not a fair question,” I said. “But it’s too late to say no, isn’t it?”

 

*        *        *

 

He explained it all with cold, surgical precision.

I had thought we were terrified before.

I needed a new scale.

“The operation is currently limited by the inaccessibility of this system through ordinary means of space travel. There is a single pool ship in orbit, supporting a single nexus on the ground. The invasion force has finite resources, and is largely dependent on co-opted Earth technology, which is far inferior to that of the main Yeerk fleet currently blockaded several thousand light-years from here.”

Bodysnatchers.

“Even so, we estimate that there are roughly twenty thousand host-ready Yeerks in the subterranean pool at the center of your city, and material to support an infestation ten times that size. The pool is where the Yeerks live in their natural state, and where they must return every three days, to absorb _kandrona_ , an essential nutrient.”

Slugs. Blind, deaf, defenseless. Just ugly little slugs that crawled in your ear and seized control of your brain. Talking with your voice. Living with your body. Raking through your memories so that they could impersonate you with absolute precision.

An endless, living nightmare.

“In all likelihood, the number of actual Controllers is currently well under a thousand, but even slow exponential growth will eventually reach a turning point. You have until that point, or until outside reinforcements from the Yeerk fleet arrive.”

“How long?” Marco asked.

“There is no way to be certain. At a minimum, six months. At a maximum, thirty.”

“And your people? The—Andalites? What about outside reinforcements from them?”

The alien shook his head. “The threat is not recognized. My people know little and less of war; they are learning, but without urgency. They see the Yeerks as an irritant, a distraction, a minor problem. By the time seven billion human Controllers begin pouring off the surface of the planet, the war will already be lost.”

“But _you_ came,” Tobias interjected.

“Yes,” the alien said. “But not to save you. If the Andalites do come, it will be to complete the mission that I failed.”

I felt my stomach twist, felt that same odd certainty, this time wrapped in a layer of the coldest, blackest ice. “You came to kill us,” I said. There was a soft rustle as the others straightened, pressure on my shoulders as the space between us closed. “You came to kill us all.”

“Yes,” he answered. He looked at each of us in turn, his eyes like flint, hard and unapologetic. “You are their food, their weapons, their war machine. Seven billion minds chained to their yoke, seven billion bodies to do their bidding. You are the wave they will ride as they sweep the galaxy clean of all who oppose them. I came to deny them their prize, armed with a weapon that should have burned your world to a cinder.”

I swallowed. Rachel’s eyes blazed with anger while Cassie’s shone with tears. Marco’s face was blank, and Tobias’s fingers were gripping the console so hard that his knuckles had gone white. “But it didn’t work,” I said, uncertain whether to feel horrified or relieved.

“No. It did not work. Now, it is up to you.”

 

*        *        *

 

I let out an involuntary gasp at the second stab of pain, somehow much worse than the first. Reaching a hand up to my ear, I felt wetness, drew my fingers away to see blood.

“This device will blend with your body’s hardware sufficiently well to be preserved during the morphing process. It will fatally terminate any Yeerk that attempts to infest you. Note that while this is a tremendous safeguard for the resistance as a whole, it will do little to protect _you_ if you are captured. Yeerks are notoriously— _disinterested_ —in unusable bodies.”

He gave the same treatment to Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, and Marco in turn, then walked back to the cabinet from which he’d drawn the syringe and began keying in a code on a smaller, locked compartment. “The device was developed after our second greatest failure,” he said. “During the battle on the Yeerk homeworld, a single Andalite was made Controller, and the resulting betrayal of our species’ secrets led to the destruction of the thirteenth fleet. Alloran’s Fall, on the tail of Seerow’s Kindness.” Opening the compartment, he reached inside and withdrew a small, blue cube, smiling grimly. “We Andalites have abandoned most of our superstitions, but one of the few that persists concerns the special nature of the number _three_. Much discussion has been had over when our third failure will come, and what its consequences will be. I can only hope that history will not label it Elfangor’s Trust.”

“Is that your name?” Tobias asked.

“Yes,” Elfangor said simply. Raising his hand, he held the cube up where we could see it. It was roughly eight inches on each side, inscribed with shapes and figures like the ones we’d seen on the ship’s controls, and it glowed with the same blue light that seemed to be the Andalite’s favorite shade. “This is the _Iscafil_ device,” he said. “It is the sole method of conferring the morphing power upon a sapient, living being. I will use it upon each of you in turn, and then teach you how to use it yourselves, and then key it such that any one of you may trigger its self-destruct sequence remotely, via telepathic link. You will keep it safe, and if you cannot keep it safe, you _will_ destroy it.”

“Wait,” I said, holding up a hand. “Why don’t _you_ keep it safe, and come with us? I mean, I know you said you were dying, but—isn’t your real body in, like, stasis? Why can’t you—I mean, why don’t you—”

I faltered, and Elfangor looked down at me with a sad, sympathetic sort of smile. “There is a limitation on the morphing power,” he explained. “The technology draws its energy from the background radiation of the universe, which is not present outside of normal space. The countdown begins the moment your body is extruded, and if you have not demorphed by the time the clock runs out, the change becomes permanent.”

“So you can get stuck as, like, a bird, or whatever?” Tobias asked.

“Worse. The construct body will persist, as it is real and does not require power to maintain. But the pocket dimension will collapse, taking with it your true body and all of the computational hardware upon which your mind and memories are stored. You will simply cease to exist, leaving only the construct in your wake.”

He began to poke at the cube, pressing certain symbols in sequence, peering closely at others. As we watched, the blue glow intensified and began to pulse, cycling through a series of patterns. “For an adult Andalite body, the charge typically lasts around one human hour. Your bodies are smaller, and in some ways less complex; I predict you may be able to stretch the time to two, or perhaps even longer. The cube will tell each of you as it transfers the morphing power; you must check the number again regularly, particularly after any significant growth spurt.”

“So in a few minutes, you’re going to morph back into your own body and just die?” Tobias demanded, an edge of anger creeping into his tone. “Why? Why can’t you just remorph? Or call for help? Or use some kind of medkit?”

Elfangor smiled again, this time casting his compassionate gaze around at each of us in turn. “Do not forget that the Visser approaches. He must not know that you were here, or you will never escape with your lives. I will remain behind as a goad and a distraction, to draw his eye from your trail. Perhaps, if I am lucky, I will even purchase a small victory with my death. It is not the worst fate that could befall an Andalite who would call himself a warrior.”

He turned to me. “Press your hand against the cube, Jake Berenson, and we shall see what fate thinks of a human child’s resolve.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Isn’t there anything else you can give us?” Rachel asked. “Shields? Sensors? Ray guns?”

Elfangor shook his head. “These technologies are all alien to Earth, and thus easily detected and tracked. The cube is risk enough—like an infant given explosives, you would accomplish little, and draw much attention.” He hesitated, then continued. “Also—and please do not take offense—you are strangers to me, and untested. I have some reasons for confidence, but who truly knows what you would do with Andalite military technology, or what those who wrest it from you would find themselves capable of? Better by far to see you fall as humans than to see you rise a threat in your own right; the galaxy does not need _two_ such scourges. That I give you even this small scrap of power is a sign of how desperate the struggle has become.”

Marco’s face twisted in the way it did whenever he caught a teacher trying to feed the class bullshit. “So you’re not willing to see us lose, but you don’t _really_ want us to win, either. What happens if we _do_ take down the Yeerks for you? You’ll be all grateful, and shower us with presents?”

Judging by Elfangor’s expression, he understood the sarcasm every bit as clearly as a human would have. “Your suspicions are not unfounded,” he said, his tone dark. “There is much knowledge among my people, but yet little wisdom. I fear they may learn the wrong lesson from our failure with the Yeerks, and in victory become the opposite of everything Seerow in his kindness intended. Could I arm you against betrayal without committing it myself, I would. But in the end, if humans clash with Andalites….”

Looking back at Marco, he shrugged. “There is reason to hope, however. There are forces larger than any of us at work, and evidence that we have been maneuvered into place by those you might call God. I do not know the future, but I have seen its broader strokes, and can rank possibility far more finely than you would credit. This meeting was not by chance, and if there are few paths to victory, at least be assured that you walk upon the widest.”

“Wait,” Marco said, his eyes wide with disbelief. “ _What?”_

 

*        *        *

 

<Now place your hands upon my flank, and quickly!>

We clustered around him, kicking aside the shreds of his clothes, Tobias and Cassie crying openly, Rachel with fury still etched across her face, Marco with the distant look of desperate calculation. I tried once more to look inside myself, to put a word to the feeling that filled my chest and locked my throat, but there was nothing. It was as if something inside me was coiled and waiting, conserving its strength, leaving me cold and numb.

<Focus your minds upon my form, my essence. Hold the image of me in your thoughts for ten seconds, and listen—you will know when the acquisition is complete.>

I did as Elfangor instructed, looking down at his blue-furred scorpion body, the muscular, segmented tail, the mouthless face with its four eyes, two pointing down, two pointing up. I tried not to look at the gaping hole in his side, at the thick, dark blood that was slowly pooling in the alien turf.

<This body will be one of your primary weapons,> he said, his exhaustion and pain somehow audible in the voice that echoed through our thoughts. <Use it to hide your identity from the Yeerks—make them think that they suffer at the hands of a guerilla force of Andalite shock troops. It is strong and fast, more than a match for Taxxons and able to defeat all but the most skilled Hork-Bajir.>

I looked over at Marco just as his eyes narrowed. Tax-what? Hork-ba- _what_?

<And now, you must go. Down the ramp, and run, as quickly as you can. The presence of my ship has scrambled their sensors, but you must be out of range when the Yeerks land. They know that I cannot be taken. They will bring only death.>

It was an inadequate conclusion in every possible way. There were a thousand things left to be said, a thousand questions unasked and unanswered. For a dangling, eternal moment, the five of us stood, each looking down at the dying alien, unwilling to be the first to turn away.

Then a flicker of movement caught my eye, and looking out through the ragged hole in the ship’s side, I saw three sparks of light sliding across the starfield. There was nothing to mark them as special or dangerous; from this distance, they could have been nothing more than planes coming in for a landing at the airport south of the city.

But I knew.

In my very bones, I knew.

“ _Move!”_ I shouted, and they did.

 

*        *        *

 

I wish I could forget the rest of that hour. Forget the horror we witnessed, watching from a distance, as the broken Andalite ship fired on the hovering Yeerk vessels, and was fired upon in turn. As the Visser’s ship landed and an Andalite emerged. As a monster erupted out of it and Elfangor died a pointless, hollow death. As a pair of police cars arrived, and the four men inside were dragged to the ground and infested by a group of Controllers led by what looked like our own vice-principal, Mr. Chapman. As those same four men stood and laughed as the Andalite ship burned.

It was my first battle. Not against the Yeerks, but against human nature, against the flaws and failings of my friends, my allies, my fellow warriors. Against Rachel’s rage, as she threatened to storm out from our hiding space and march herself to slaughter. Against Cassie’s terror, as it shook her to the core and spread like sickness to the others. Against the black desperation that filled Tobias, as if he’d lost his father, his brother, his only reason to live. Against the callous cold that Marco drew about himself like a cloak, as if he could hide from fear and pain by pretending they didn’t matter. I fought to hold them together, to keep them from breaking. I begged, I bargained, I commanded and cajoled—and to my surprise, they listened, and we lived.

It was my first battle, but it wouldn’t be my last. And as we crawled away through the dirt and the darkness, hoping with every step to wake up from the nightmare, I wondered again what I would see, if I knew myself as well as I knew my friends. Four of them, each with flaws that could easily prove fatal.

Who would watch for mine?


	2. Marco

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the immediate aftermath of the events of the construction site, Marco attempts to encourage something approximating sanity among the rest of the group.

**Chapter 02: Marco**

I try not to be stupid.

Yeah, yeah, I know—who doesn’t, right? I mean, nobody gets up in the morning and sets out to be a moron.

But there’s a pretty big difference between not-trying-to-do-it-wrong and actually-trying-to-do-it-right. It’s a lot like the difference between telling yourself you’re going to get started on that history paper, and actually pulling the books out of your bag. It’s just one extra step, just a _little_ extra work, but it’s one step further than most people are willing to go.

Even people like Jake, who are mostly on top of things. Jake was doing his best, and his best was turning out to be pretty damn good, not that I was surprised. I’d known him since kindergarten, and watching him wrangle Cassie, Tobias, and Rachel was like connecting dots. That fearless leader thing had always been hiding in there somewhere; it had just never had a good reason to come out.

But instinct and charisma can only get you so far. At some point, no matter how good you are, you’re going to have to stop and _think_.

I was usually good at thinking. Not just at doing it, but at _remembering_ to do it, at doing it _right_. Dotting all the I’s, crossing all the T’s.

Which made it all the more embarrassing that I hadn’t noticed the GLARINGLY OBVIOUS DANGER until it had already passed. Luck—we had survived thanks to sheer, dumb luck, and if we hadn’t, I would have died _knowing_ it was my fault.

It was 9:03PM. The construction site was quiet and still, the three Yeerk spacecraft having launched silently skyward a few minutes before. The ground in front of us was empty and barren, with nothing to show that Elfangor’s ship had ever been there. There weren’t even any scorch marks—somehow, the Yeerk weapons had vaporized it with basically zero wasted heat or energy.

Jake had deputized Cassie, who was making soothing, rational noises at Rachel while he did the same for Tobias. I wasn’t paying much attention, because I was too busy mentally kicking myself.

The Yeerk sensors had been jammed _by the presence of Elfangor’s ship_.

Elfangor’s ship _was no longer present._

Which meant that the Yeerks had probably been _entirely capable of detecting five stupid kids huddling in the middle of an otherwise empty construction site._

We should have kept running, all the way home. Or better yet, all the way back to the mall, where we could have dropped a few more quarters at the arcade to establish an alibi and then called my dad for a ride.

But no. Instead, we’d stayed to _watch_.

I felt a sharp pain in my palms and looked down to see that my fists were clenched, my fingers curled so tight that the nails were threatening to break the skin. Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to relax, to _think_.

Common sense said that the Yeerks should have seen us before lifting off. It said that they should have torched the low foundation we were cowering behind—or better yet, grabbed us with a tractor beam and dragged us out to be infested like those poor cops.

But they hadn’t done that. So either the Yeerks were stupid, or they’d left us alive on purpose, or they just hadn’t _noticed_ us, or their sensors didn’t penetrate concrete, or they didn’t care if anybody saw them because they already controlled the internet, or scanning the site wasn’t standard procedure and the Visser was an incompetent tyrant whose minions were too scared to take any initiative—

I squeezed my eyes shut. Sometimes my brain does this thing where it refuses to admit that it’s finished scraping the bottom of the barrel and is now digging up splinters.

_Step one: figure out steps two, three, and four._

We needed to get out of the construction site. We needed to test this whole morphing thing. We needed to talk about the alien invasion going on in the center of our town. We needed to figure out where the center of our town was. We needed to get home. We needed to talk about whether that had actually been vice-principal Chapman, and whether anybody had recognized anybody else. We needed to acquire each other’s DNA in case we ever had to cover for each other. We needed to acquire some adults. We needed to find an adult we could trust. We needed to knock out Rachel and Tobias and Cassie before they could do anything stupid—

_Splinters._

Okay. We needed to get out of there, check in at home, and then meet someplace safe to talk it all over. Two, three, and four.

_And make really, really, really sure that nobody’s about to crack and call up their best friend or whatever, because that would be really, really, REALLY bad—_

Fine. Two-A, two-B, three, and four.

“Jake,” I said.

Jake looked over and held up a finger. I sighed.

Turning away from the group, I looked up at the stars. There weren’t many visible, what with the glare of the lights from the mall and the highway. A few hundred, maybe. None of them appeared to be moving. _Probably_ none of them were spaceships, but who knew? Elfangor’s ship had decloaked right in front of our eyes.

_The Yeerk ships didn’t, though. They were visible the whole time. Another mistake? Or a technology they don’t have?_

More mysteries. I looked back down at the dirt, at the place where Elfangor had died.

“The morphing process will take approximately two minutes,” he’d said, two minutes before his mouth had disappeared and an extra pair of eyes had sprouted from the back of his head. “You will initiate it with a burst of intense concentration. Simply focus on the desired organism, and visualize the transformation. Imagine it happening, and the morphing mechanism will respond.”

I held out my hand. Elfangor’s had had seven fingers. I distinctly remembered watching the extra two emerge as blue fur spread across his human skin. One of them had grown like a tumor out of the web between his thumb and index finger. The other had split off of his pinky, like in Mrs. Delphi’s life science video on cell division.

Giving in to a sudden, crazy impulse, I let my eyes flutter closed, focused intently, tried to imagine what it would feel like to have seven fingers, four eyes, to feel an extra pair of legs bursting from my abdomen, to sprout a tail whose tip was a deadly, razor-sharp shard of bone. I held the image of the alien in my mind, trying not to notice the words _this is insane_ as they floated across like subtitles.

“Marco?”

I opened my eyes and looked down at my hand. It was pretty dark, but I was reasonably sure nothing had changed.

 _Well, he_ did _say it would take hours to analyze the first samples._

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Jake, his eyes two sparks in the deep shadow of his face. “You okay, amigo?” he asked softly.

I let out a low, humorless laugh. “If any of the rest of them answered yes to that question, it’s time to call the nuthouse.”

Jake looked back at Tobias, who was sitting in the dirt a few yards away, his head in his hands, silent sobs shaking his body. “We need to get out of here,” Jake muttered. “Someplace safe, where we can figure all this stuff out. The Magnuson park playground, maybe. Or Cassie’s barn.”

“Cassie’s barn sounds good,” I said. “But home first. Nothing suspicious. Nothing to make it look like we did anything other than spend a boring Saturday night at the mall. If there really are a thousand Controllers already—”

“—then there’s probably somebody close enough to notice if we start acting weird. Right.” Jake scrubbed at his eyes for a moment, then sighed, his shoulders sagging. “I’m going to have to tell everyone it’s time to go, aren’t I?”

I snorted and rolled my eyes, not caring that he couldn’t really see them in the dark. “Hey,” I called out, loudly.

The others all looked up.

“You guys ready to get out of here?”

No one said anything.

“Oooookay. Um. Look. It’s already after nine. But we need to get together and talk, too. I think—I think we should go back to the mall, chill in the arcade for a bit, and then call for a ride. That way, it looks like we were there the whole time, and just lost track of how late it was.”

I paused, but still no one said anything. They just sat there, staring at me.

“And then, we can all meet up at Cassie’s—everybody know where Cassie lives?”

Crickets.

“Fine, right. We all go to sleep, and then sneak out and meet up at Cassie’s at—let’s say one AM. And we should wait to figure out this whole morphing thing until we’re all together, in case anything goes wrong. Everybody agree?”

As if on cue, Tobias, Rachel and Cassie all turned to look at Jake.

I let out another hollow laugh. That was going to be a problem if Jake ever decided not to listen to reason one day.

 _Or if Elfangor’s little earplugs don’t work on humans, and the Yeerks get ahold of him_.

I shuddered. To cover it, I dropped to my knees and raised my hands above my head, as if in prayer. “Oh, Fearless Leader,” I intoned, kowtowing in Jake’s direction. “Wilt thou call upon the holy spirit of Simon Says, and bestow thy blessing on my humble and unworthy plan?”

Jake shifted uncomfortably. “Since when do you all wait for _me_ to decide these things?” he muttered.

No one answered. Except me, of course—I went _ommmm_ and he kicked me. Then he said some words, and together we headed back toward the mall, the fate of the human race on our shoulders.

 

*        *        *

 

I expected trouble from Tobias and Rachel. I mean, they’ve both got that whole _don’t-tell-me-what-to-do_ vibe going on, you know? Rachel because she’s this total prom queen princess type, and Tobias because he’s this tragic, troubled youth with a bad home life and a leather jacket.

I had _not_ expected trouble from Cassie.

“I’m sorry,” she said, avoiding Jake’s disapproving gaze as she peered out at us from over the stall door, her long mane shriveling into the tight curls of her short-cropped hair. “I wasn’t even really trying to. I was just finishing up with Peppermint, and she went all quiet and still, and I wondered if I’d accidentally done the thing, acquired her or whatever, and then I just thought, you know.” She disappeared from view, and we could hear the rustle of fabric, the sound of zippers and snaps. A moment later, she emerged, biting her lip. “It’s just—I’ve literally had dreams about being a horse for my _entire life_. And then my parents went to bed at ten thirty, and I came out here to wait, and I just thought—well, what harm could it do?”

I looked over at Jake, realizing a split second too late that I was being an idiot, that Jake wasn’t actually in charge of anything and that furthermore he was pretty much Cassie’s boyfriend and probably couldn’t be relied on to do the appropriate amount of screaming and yelling that this situation called for.

Sure enough, his expression softened. “That was still a really big risk, Cassie,” he said. “You didn’t even lock the barn door. We just walked right in. What if we’d been Controllers?”

She looked sheepish. “Well, I mean, we _never_ lock the barn door, so if my parents _had_ come down, I would have had to explain why it was locked, and I just—I don’t know. It just didn’t seem likely, I guess.”

I was going to point out that suddenly being granted the ability to turn into a horse by a dying alien wasn’t particularly likely, either, and that maybe it was time to start taking unlikely possibilities very, very seriously, but Jake got there first.

For a very loose definition of _there_ , anyway.

“You WHAT?” I spluttered, after actually feeling my jaw drop.

It was Jake’s turn to look sheepish, which he _didn’t_ , instead crossing his arms and frowning as if _I_ was the one who was being unreasonable. “I morphed Homer,” he repeated, matter-of-fact. “In the bathroom, with the door locked, while the shower was running.”

“Me, too,” Tobias said quietly. “I mean, not Homer. Dude. I morphed Dude, my cat.”

“What part of _wait until we can all be there_ didn’t make sense to you people?” I said, completely aware that I was about an inch away from shouting. “We’re messing around with alien technology that’s supposedly _shoving our bodies out into hyperspace._ We were supposed to do this together—we were supposed to do this _smart!”_

“Hey,” Rachel interjected. “Who died and made _you_ emperor?”

“Who died and made _Jake_ emperor?” I shot back. “This has nothing to do with who’s in charge, this has to do with what makes _sense_. With keeping ourselves from getting _killed._ What did _you_ morph into—a parakeet?”

“No,” she answered quietly. “My sister. Sara.”

There was a soft rustle as the whole group took in a breath. I felt a cold prickle of sweat break out between my shoulder blades. I’d already been thinking about acquiring people, but thinking about it and doing it were two very different things. Even _I_ hadn’t expected that particular line to be crossed so quickly.

“That,” I said, slowly and carefully, “was really st—”

“Oh, shut _up_ ,” Rachel snapped, leaping up from the bale of hay where she’d been sitting and sticking a finger in my face. “You think you’re the only one here with brains, Marco? My sister is not a Controller. She’s _eight years old._ They don’t _want_ her for anything. Besides, if she was, then _I_ would have been—don’t you think the very first move a Controller would make would be to infest the rest of her family? And she didn’t notice me acquiring her, because she was already falling asleep—I did it while I carried her up to bed. And there was no chance anybody was going to catch me, because I did it in my room, with the lights out, with the door locked, _and_ with the dresser shoved up against it. So take that smug little attitude and shove it, okay?”

“Rachel,” Jake began warningly.

“ _No_ , Jake,” I said, cutting him off. The hot anger I’d initially felt had cooled into obsidian, and my voice was tight and controlled as I stood to face Rachel. She was a good foot and a half taller than me, but I forced myself to loom anyway, pushing forward so that she had no choice but to take a step back. “Rachel’s right. I’m _not_ the only one with brains. Because I never even _thought_ about using eight-year-olds to infest entire families, or how one elementary school teacher could pretty much take out a whole neighborhood. Just put the class down for naptime, open up your Thermos, and there you go—an all-you-can-infest buffet.”

Rachel’s glare didn’t change much, but I saw her eyes widen a little, saw the edges of her mouth compress. Around me, the others had gone rigid, even Jake shocked into silence. “You know who _does_ have brains, though?” I continued. “The Yeerks. Maybe a thousand of them already. A thousand human brains, a thousand slaves, except those slaves can’t even _think_ without their masters knowing about it. Every idea those thousand people have—every escape plan, every desperate hope, every Yeerk weakness they manage to figure out—the Yeerks _know_. They know _all_ of it, can use _all_ of it. If just _one_ of those people happens to realize, just _accidentally makes the connection_ that oh, hey, you know what, elementary schools are this giant weak spot in humanity’s defenses, then it’s game over, because they don’t just get our bodies, they get our minds _too._ Every new Controller counts double, because not only do we lose everything that person could have brought to the fight, the Yeerks _gain_ all that.”

I was pushing too hard, could tell that I was pushing too hard, but I didn’t care. I’d been wrestling with the weight of this for an hour, struggling to think through all of the implications, feeling hope slip away, and meanwhile, the rest of them had been morphing into _pets._ I rounded on them, burned each of them with my glare as I tore at their illusions, their happy ignorance. “There is _nothing_ standing in their way except us—did you get that? This isn’t some movie, where humanity’s going to rise up and pull some bullshit trick out of its ass. The Yeerks are _winning._ They’ve got a thousand of us already, they could have twenty thousand more in a couple of weeks, and _nobody’s noticed._ Elfangor said the point of no return might be six months away, and that means that tomorrow it’ll be five months and twenty nine days, and we’ve got _nothing_ on our side except morphing, and you guys have already decided it’s a _toy_. Did you not see Elfangor get _eaten?_ Do you not understand the stakes? He didn’t give each one of us the destruct code for the box because he believes in equality or democracy or some crap like that, he gave it to all of us because he knew that _four of us might die and there might be just one of us left to stop the Yeerks from getting their hands on it._ He was coming to _destroy the planet_ because he thought that might be the only way to stop them.”

I ground to a halt. Even though my voice was still quiet, still low and tight, my chest was heaving. The sweat that had begun between my shoulder blades had spread, and I could feel it soaking into my shirt, into the waistband of my boxers. I looked at each one of them in turn, held each pair of eyes for a full five seconds before moving on to the next.

Except for Jake, I didn’t really know these people. They were placeholders, stereotypes, faces in the crowd— _Jake’s cousin, Jake’s crush,_ and _that emo kid who hangs around sometimes_. Instead of Rachel, Cassie, and Tobias, I could have been walking home with Phillip, Erek, and Jennifer. Or David, Cate, and Elizabeth. I could have been walking home with Melissa Chapman, who—if Rachel was right—was almost certainly a Controller.

I didn’t know these people, but I needed them.

“We’re _it_ , guys,” I said. “Just the five of us. If we don’t make it, if we screw it up, then the human race will _actually lose_. So yeah, I think it was _stupid_ for Cassie to morph into a horse just to live out some little girl dream. I think it was _stupid_ for Jake and Tobias to morph basically defenseless animals when anyone in their houses might be a Controller already. I think it was _stupid_ for Rachel to morph her sister _in her house_ , when any second her mom could have pulled the whole open-this-door-right-now-young-lady routine. There are seven billion people who are going to live or die based on the mistakes we do or don’t make. Being dumb is something we can’t afford, and I don’t _care_ if you all think I’m an asshole for saying it.”

Suddenly tired, I turned away from them, closed my mouth and dropped heavily onto a nearby bale of hay. I felt drained, empty, as if I’d just finished running the mile in PE. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to switch off and let someone else take control.

But I couldn’t. And maybe I’d never be able to again.

I looked back up. The four of them were all still frozen, various mixtures of anger, horror, and shame written on their faces as they looked at each other, at the animal cages lining the walls of the barn—at anything but me.

“Cassie,” I said flatly, hoping to change the subject. “What’s the deal with this place? Why do you guys have all these animals?”

She turned toward me, and I was surprised to see warmth and sympathy in her eyes. “This is the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic,” she said. “Both my parents are vets, and my dad gets money from the state to take care of injured animals picked up by Animal Control, get them ready to be released back into the wild. We’ve usually got hawks and falcons who’ve been shot or hurt during storms, squirrels and raccoons and ‘possums who’ve been hit by cars, sometimes wolves or foxes or deer. We had a small bear one time, but that was a few years ago.”

She bit her lip. “Also,” she said, hesitantly, “also, my mom is the head vet at the Gardens. I can probably get us in without raising any suspicions. The zoo there has sharks, tigers, snakes, bats, elephants—pretty much everything.”

I ran my fingers through my hair. _Evidence that we have been maneuvered into place by those you might call God_ , Elfangor had said.

Maybe he’d been telling the truth. Maybe the deck really was stacked in our favor, at least in some ways.

I looked around at the cages. About half of them were empty, but near the door were four large ones, each with a bird of prey. There was some kind of hawk with reddish feathers in its tail, a black-and-white osprey with one wing encased in plaster, a tawny owl with only one eye, and what looked like a young bald eagle.

Cassie had been following my gaze. “Do you think we should acquire them?” she asked timidly. “I can pull them out.”

_If we morph an injured animal, do we get the injuries?_

_If we get injured in morph, do the injuries go away when we re-morph?_

_If one of us acquires an animal, can the others acquire from the morph, or do they have to acquire the original, too?_

I shook my head. “Yes. But not yet. There’s something else I think we need to do, first.”

 

*        *        *

 

We’d decided to stay in the barn. The woods would have been safer in terms of the risk from Cassie’s parents, but the Yeerk ships had looked like they were headed for orbit, and it was a clear night. No sense in making satellite surveillance any easier than it had to be.

I was in the farthest stall at the back of the barn, away from Cassie’s three horses, with Jake and Tobias standing beside me. Rachel was just outside the door with her back turned; after seeing what happened to Elfangor’s clothes when he went from human to Andalite, I’d left mine in a pile in the corner. Cassie had stayed up front, where she was pretending to clean an empty cage, ready to head off her parents if they showed up.

Tobias had wanted to do it, but in a surprisingly generous move, Rachel had stepped up in my defense, arguing that out of the five of us, I was the only one who hadn’t gotten to try out the morphing power yet. I wasn’t totally comfortable with that kind of reasoning, but I appreciated the olive branch.

“You ready?” Jake asked.

I nodded tightly, trying not to let my nervousness show as I stood there, covering as much as I could with my hands. It was one thing to play around with imagining extra fingers when you were half-convinced it wouldn’t work. It was another thing to contemplate actually turning into some kind of alien centaur scorpion.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Tobias said. “It’s super gross and disturbing, but it doesn’t hurt.”

I nodded again. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and focused.

This time, I could feel the changes immediately, feel the grinding as my bones rearranged, the sloshing as my organs liquefied and re-formed into new and complex structures. I was unable to keep my eyes closed and they snapped open just in time to see the two new legs bursting out of my abdomen, complete with blue fur and dark, sueded hooves. Unbalanced, I fell forward, Jake and Tobias reaching out to steady me.

There were a thousand changes, all of them happening in a rush, the two minutes flashing by as every piece of my body’s familiar territory was replaced with an alien landscape.

My mouth, sealing shut like a Ziploc bag as my nose flattened and my jawbone melted away.

My ears, turning pointy and sliding upward as my hearing sharpened noticeably.

My arms, withering slightly as they became the slender, graceful arms of an Andalite, complete with seven fingers at the end of each flexible hand.

My spine, lengthening and bending as the middle of my back became a sort of second hip, a hinge that left my upper body not quite upright, like a cobra preparing to strike.

My eyes—my _new_ eyes, opening at the ends of two long stalks that sprouted from the back of my neckless head, offering me a full three hundred and sixty degrees of vision.

My tail.

It was the tail that marked the end of the transformation, a thick column of muscle, as heavy as my whole torso, counterbalancing the centaur body. I felt it grow, and grow, and grow, impossibly long, until it was fully capable of whipping over my—was it really still a shoulder?—and hitting targets outside of my arms’ reach. The blade of bone seemed to slide out of the shaft like Wolverine’s claws, a wicked scythe more than a foot long, as thick as a book at the base and tapering to a razor’s edge, a needle’s point.

As I lashed it back and forth, unable to resist the sheer sensation of power, I felt the body’s brain awaken. There were no thoughts, no memories, no personality—only a strange sort of _reaching_ , a cup somehow straining to be filled. It was like a house where someone’s mind had lived, the ghost of consciousness still lingering in empty archives, in idle processors. The brain’s structure pulled at me, tugged on me, drew my own mind forward as if eager to absorb me and start thinking again.

“Marco?” Jake asked. “You okay in there?”

I turned to look at him with all four eyes, tried opening my mouth and remembered that I didn’t have one. <I think so,> I thought at him. <Can you hear me?>

Jake grinned, relief plain on his face. “Yeah, I can hear you. That’s amazing, actually.”

Tobias tapped me on the shoulder, and I swiveled my stalk eyes in his direction, keeping my main eyes on Jake. “What’s it _like?”_ he asked.

I considered briefly. <It’s—>

<ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.>


	3. Rachel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The group attempts to understand the morphing power, and tension between conflicting ideologies threatens to pull everyone apart, causing Rachel to take unilateral action.

**Chapter 03: Rachel**

I straightened in the stall, giving my body a quick once-over to confirm that all of my parts had, in fact, returned to their rightful places. Pulling on my clothes, I called out to the others. “I’m clear.”

The door swung open to reveal Cassie and Jake, both standing with expectant looks on their faces. “Still there,” I said. “Exactly the same as what everybody else heard. The voice goes ‘Elfangor, brother, help me,’ and then there’s like a ten second pause, and then it repeats.”

Jake nodded, the muscles in his jaw tight. “Did you mark the angle?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Again, same as what you guys got.” I stepped aside so that they could see the two lines I’d gouged with my Andalite tail blade—one in the rough, unfinished wood of the stall wall, and one in the dirt of the floor. “It was definitely coming from under the ground.”

Cassie stepped forward, holding the plastic protractor she’d retrieved from her bedroom earlier that morning, when we’d reassembled after a long and sleepless night. “It’s tough to be really accurate,” she said. “But it looks just like yours and mine. Thirty-ish degrees below horizontal.”

“And just a little bit south of west,” I added, pointing at the line on the ground. “So unless it’s coming from the middle of the planet somehow—”

“—then Elfangor’s brother is trapped somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean,” Jake finished. He sighed, scrubbing at his eyes again, and looked over at Cassie’s globe, conspicuously out-of-place amid the hay bales and the dull metal cages. We’d tried extrapolating based on the direction the voice seemed to be coming from, had drawn a circle around our best guess as to its origin. It was about an inch across, a tight little loop in the middle of a wide patch of blue.

Just a little bigger than Texas.

“We’re definitely assuming this isn’t some kind of trick, then?” I asked.

Jake shrugged. “I don’t see how it could be, or why anyone would bother. Elfangor’s dead. And we’re only hearing the message when we’re in Andalite morph. I don’t know how hack-proof thought-speak is, but if the signal is somehow keyed to Elfangor’s DNA…”

“It might not be his DNA,” Cassie pointed out. “It could be his brainwaves, or something. I mean, if what we’re morphing is an _exact_ copy of his body, all the way down to the neurons and stuff…”

“Not important,” I interrupted. “What’s important is figuring out what we’re going to do about it.”

Jake and Cassie exchanged glances, and I felt a flicker of irritation. “There might not be anything we _can_ do, Rachel,” Jake said quietly. “That’s thousands of miles away from here. Hundreds of miles from the nearest land. If that circle’s in the right place, the globe says the water’s over two miles deep.”

The flicker turned into a small, bright flame and my eyes narrowed. “So it’s not going to be easy,” I said, letting my voice go sharp. “Don’t tell me you think that means we ought to do _nothing._ ” I looked back and forth between them, but neither offered a response. “Elfangor _died_ so that the five of us could get away. We can’t just abandon his brother.”

“After the mission to kill us all didn’t go according to plan, you mean,” Jake corrected. “We don’t know who his brother is, or what he’ll want, or how he’ll react when he finds out Elfangor is dead.”

“So your solution is to just ignore him? Leave him to drown, or starve?”

“That’s _not_ what I’m—”

“Guys!” Cassie broke in. “This isn’t—I mean, can we please just wait for Tobias and Marco to get back? Instead of trying to figure it out by ourselves?”

Jake crossed his arms, his mouth clicking shut. I could see him wrestling with his own irritation, struggling to keep his cool. I said nothing, only spun on my heel and began pacing up and down the length of the barn.

It wasn’t Jake’s fault. I was on edge, overreacting, looking for excuses to argue. I couldn’t help it—I hadn’t slept at all, and every minute or so, my body would send another wave of adrenaline crashing through my bloodstream. It had been almost fifteen hours since Elfangor’s ship had appeared in front of us, and since then, we’d done nothing but stand around and talk.

Okay, that wasn’t true. We’d all tried morphing, and we’d gone ahead and acquired every animal in Cassie’s barn the night before so that the analysis could run its course. We’d confirmed that the message from Elfangor’s brother was, in fact, a message, and not a live communication, and we’d gone ahead and started working out its origin while Marco and Tobias went out into the woods to experiment with the telepathy that seemed to be part of the morphing technology.

But we hadn’t _done_ anything, and I was starting to unravel. I could feel the pressure of inaction across every inch of my skin, getting tighter and tighter as the seconds ticked by.

On my third lap across the barn, I stopped abruptly. “I’m going to practice morphing until they get back,” I said. “I’ll use the stall.”

I ducked back inside before they could reply, pulling the door shut behind me. Taking my phone out of my pocket, I set it on a small ledge and opened up the stopwatch app, then stripped down. With a deep breath, I pushed _start_ and focused all of my thoughts on my chosen target.

_Badger,_ I thought to myself.

I had actually met the badger before, a scarred old male who’d been pulled out from under a log by a pair of hikers in the national park. Cassie and I had been working on homework together on the day he’d been found, and I’d been conscripted into helping while she and her dad operated on his broken back. Closing my eyes, I pictured his thick, wiry fur, his long, hooked claws, his wide, stubby tail.

The first thing I noticed was a feeling of falling. My eyes shot open as my body shrank down, the rest of the barn rocketing skyward. I was barely three feet tall before anything else started to change.

As I watched, my body began to turn colors—mostly black, but with bright slashes of pure white. There was an itchy, tingling sensation, and suddenly everything shattered and shivered and split, a million tiny hairs forming themselves out of what had moments before been smooth skin.

It was about then that my eyesight started to weaken, the world around me blurring as my eyes shrank and receded, changing from bright blue to the badger’s beady dark brown. At the same time, my nose and mouth began protruding, stretching farther and farther forward as the bones of my face rearranged into a long, sturdy snout.

I fell forward onto hands and knees just as my arms and legs began to shrink, sucking up into my body like spaghetti. I felt the connection between my head and my spine disappear as my skull rotated backward, then felt it re-form, the vertebrae clicking into place in their new arrangement. It was like being at the dentist—I could sense what was happening to my body, could tell that it _should_ hurt, but I felt it only vaguely, distantly, as if it were happening to somebody else.

It was a good thing, too, because as my claws ripped their way out of my fingers and toes, I not only _saw_ the bones inside my hands—I _smelled_ them, too. If I’d been able to sense pain normally, I would have been driven completely insane before the morph was even halfway done. Every single piece of me had been torn apart, rearranged, and stuck back together.

With a nauseating sound like cutting meat, my tail pushed out from the base of my spine, and the morph was complete. Holding still, I braced myself for the appearance of the badger’s mind.

We’d discovered that our control over the morphs wasn’t a hundred percent—which was actually a relief, because it meant we didn’t have to figure out how to swim and crawl and fly from scratch. There was a sort of residual awareness, a collection of emotions and instincts that were more than capable of running the morphed body on their own.

For some morphs—like Elfangor’s body, or the birds of prey—the effect was pretty mild. There was hunger, and maybe a drive to hunt or hide, and some subtle shifts in what caught your attention, but otherwise, you mostly felt like _you_.

With the horses, though, it was almost impossible to shake the skittishness. It was like being on five cups of coffee—there would be a sound, and the horse body would have already reacted before your human brain had even registered it. And when Cassie tried out squirrel morph, she lost control completely for almost five minutes, tearing around the barn in a panic. The squirrel’s instincts were just too powerful, too ingrained, and it wasn’t until Tobias dipped back into hawk morph and communicated with her telepathically that she was able to get a grip.

I was pretty confident that the badger would be easy to handle. It was a big and powerful animal, fairly high up on the food chain, and this badger in particular had seemed more bored than afraid each time I’d seen Cassie give him his meds. But I steeled myself mentally, just in case.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry. The badger was sleepy, confident, and hungry, in that order. It was like sharing my brain with the essence of Saturday mornings. Other than a slightly-higher-than-usual desire to sniff around in the dirt of the stall floor, I felt completely normal and completely in control.

Rearing, I tried to make out the numbers on my phone. The ledge where I’d left it was only a foot above my head, but the badger’s vision was terrible. Everything was blurred, and all of the colors were washed out and subtly shifted. I could see a dark, rectangular shape with something bright moving inside, but otherwise nothing.

Okay, fine. I’d been in morph for—what—thirty seconds? If I demorphed immediately, I could still get a pretty decent estimate of how long the transformation had taken. I was interested in finding out whether morphs of different size took different amounts of time, or whether the technology responded to a harder mental push. Taking one last sniff, I focused on my own body and began to reverse the changes.

My normal human vision returned in time to see the stopwatch tick over from 2:59 to 3:00, and I kept my eyes locked on it for the rest of the transformation. It read 3:47 when the last of the squelching, schlooping, and grinding finished, and I did the math in my head in a heartbeat.

Just over a minute and a half. No different, in other words, than when I’d morphed into Sara or Elfangor. It wasn’t enough to lock in the pattern for sure, but it was pretty solid evidence to start with. Human child, dog-sized mammal, or full-sized alien—apparently, size and complexity made no difference.

Resetting the timer, I focused on the squirrel, and began my second morph. My sixth, in total.

Four minutes later, as I returned to human form, I suddenly realized that my whole body was trembling and tired, my arms heavy as if I’d just finished running through my gymnastics routine. Frowning, I took a step, and was just barely able to stop my knees from buckling.

_That_ was new.

“Guys?” I called out weakly. Reaching for my clothes, I overbalanced, my shoulder slamming against the stall wall. I stayed in that position as I tugged on my jeans, leaning heavily against the wood as I slid them past my hips. Stashing the phone in my pocket, I threw my coat around my shoulders and stepped shakily back out of the stall.

Cassie and Jake were over by the barn door, poring over the globe and a sheet full of scribbled drawings and diagrams. They looked up as I walked out, their faces immediately flooding with concern.

“Rachel!” Cassie shouted, as they both ran over to me. “Sit down!”

I levered myself toward one of the hay bales, feeling tired all over, and just barely made it, my muscles giving way as I dropped heavily into a sitting position. “Tired,” I said.

“What happened?” Jake asked. “Are you okay? You’re white as a sheet.” Behind me, Cassie grabbed my shoulders, pulling me back to lean against her thighs and stomach.

“Morphed and demorphed,” I said, each word a weight that had to be lifted individually. “Twice, rapid-fire.”

“And it did _this?”_ he said, appalled. “You look like you did when you had pneumonia last year.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it. “Not like that.” I lifted my arm, let it drop back into my lap. “Not dizzy. Not sick. More like, just ran ten miles.”

I felt Cassie’s fingers gently buttoning my jacket for me, then twitched when they pressed against the line of my jaw. I realized she was checking my pulse, and held still, noticing as I did that my breathing was normal, neither particularly fast nor particularly slow.

“Heart rate’s about fifty-four,” Cassie announced. “A little low, but she’s a gymnast. Totally normal.”

I shrugged my shoulders and tensed my legs. “Not sore, either,” I said. “Just really, really—”

I broke off. I had been about to say _really, really tired_ , but in the minute or so that I’d been sitting there, one of the _reallys_ had dropped off. Now I only felt like I’d run _five_ miles.

“What is it?” Jake asked, still sounding slightly hysterical.

“Nothing,” I replied. “It’s weird. It’s already fading.” I gently pulled Cassie’s hands off of my shoulders and straightened, still sitting on the bale. “It hit me like a ton of bricks, but I’m already halfway back to normal.”

“Don’t stand up yet,” Cassie warned. “You’re still looking pretty pale.”

I nodded, and stayed seated. “Do you think it has something to do with the morphing tech?” I wondered aloud. “Like, obviously, duh. But with the morphing tech _itself._ The nanobots, or whatever.”

Jake shrugged, his expression still tight. “Could be. Elfangor said something about them having a charge. But I don’t see why that would make _you_ tired.”

“Some kind of fail-safe?” Cassie suggested. “An automatic shutoff, to stop you from overloading the system?”

“If so, that’s something we’re going to have to do more experiments with,” I said. “Don’t want to suddenly run out of morphing power in the middle of a fight.”

“Like hell,” Jake snapped. “I don’t care about some fight, I care about the fact that my cousin just came _this_ close to dying of exhaustion.”

I smiled, feeling the last of the strange fatigue draining away from my arms and legs. “Real sweet, Jake, but I’m fine. Look.” Standing, I shook out my hands and feet, rotated my shoulders and hips.

“Still,” Jake said. “That’s—what—ten transformations this morning? Counting both morphing and demorphing? Six in the past fifteen minutes. I don’t want you doing any more for at least a couple of hours.”

“Who’s gonna stop me?”

“Rachel—”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” I said, holding up my hands as Jake put on his best stern-dad expression. “I’ll hold off for a while. But we really _do_ need to figure out what the limits are.” I looked over at the globe. “Especially if we’re going to have to chain morphs together all day while we swim or fly across an ocean.”

I looked back just in time to catch Jake’s grimace, and then my own voice filled my head.

<Eagle Leader to Eagle Nest. Inbound, ETA thirty seconds, Tobias ate a mouse. Over.>

 

*        *        *

 

“Short version: thought-speak has a range of about three hundred yards, and shouting or whispering doesn’t change the range, but it _does_ change the volume. It clicks on about halfway through the morph no matter what, and you can thought-speak from _any_ morph, including human. It doesn’t matter if there’s stuff in the way, and you can send things that aren’t words, like humming or beeps, but they still translate into the other person’s ‘voice.’ It also has some kind of automatic built-in privacy targeting thingy—I was right next to Tobias and basically thought-shouting, but he couldn’t hear me unless I wanted him to. Oh, and side note—we tried acquiring from a morph, and it works. I can now officially impersonate Tobias’s cat, Dude.”

We were sitting in a circle in the barn, just as we had the night before. Marco was perched on the same high, sturdy shelf where he’d left his spare clothes, his legs kicking and dangling as he looked down at the rest of us. He’d flown in, demorphed in place, and immediately begun talking, a hint of excitement leaking through his doom-and-gloom attitude. Jake and Cassie and I were listening, having already explained about the morphing fatigue while the pair of them were coming out of bird form. Tobias was off to one side, slightly apart from the rest of us, a queasy sort of look on his face.

“Did you check the distress signal?” Jake asked.

“Yeah,” Marco said, nodding. “It was just as strong and coming from the same direction even when we went two or three miles out, so it’s definitely not just three hundred yards deep underground or anything like that. Oh, and there’s something special about it, because when Tobias and I were talking at each other, we couldn’t tell where _our_ thoughts were coming from.”

I frowned. “A homing beacon? Tied right into the message somehow?”

“Makes sense, for a distress signal,” Jake said. “Did you guys run into any trouble with multiple morphs? Like what happened to Rachel?”

“Not really,” Marco said. “We got a little tired after a while, but we never did four changes back-to-back like that.” He glanced at Tobias. “We _did_ run into a little trouble with the morph’s instincts. Turns out they can take you by surprise pretty quick.”

Tobias’s mouth thinned to a tight line, and his cheeks flushed. “There was a mouse,” he said curtly. “It was like flipping a switch. The hawk just took over.”

“Which raises an interesting question, actually,” Marco said. “Is there a mouse inside you right now?”

I saw Jake and Cassie’s eyes widen with surprise. Tobias’s face didn’t change—he’d clearly already been considering the possibility, and was none too thrilled about it.

“Because the way the morphing seems to happen,” Marco continued, “your body changes piece by piece, right? So theoretically, you might have morphed _around_ the mouse.”

“Do we really have to talk about this?” Cassie asked, her eyes on Tobias, whose blush had turned slightly green.

Marco shrugged. “No. But the question becomes a lot more interesting when we’re talking about bullets, instead of mice.”

I shivered. Jake gave a low whistle and stuck his hands in his pockets, while Cassie reached out to put a hand on Tobias’s shoulder. For a moment, we were all silent.

Then a thought occurred to me. “Hey,” I said. “Actually, that reminds me—you said thought-speak works when you’re in human morph?”

Marco nodded.

“You and Tobias morphed each other?”

Another nod.

“What—um. What happened to your clothes? When you morphed?”

“Nothing. We just morphed inside them, basically.”

“But they fell off when you morphed into birds?”

“Yeah. They’re stashed out by those big rocks, at the edge of the woods. Figured we’d pick them up on the way out.”

I frowned. Something was tickling at the edge of my thoughts, but I couldn’t quite put it into words.

“What is it, Rachel?” Cassie asked.

I shook my head. “Dunno,” I replied. Our clothes had fallen off each time we’d morphed something small. And when Elfangor had demorphed from human to his larger Andalite body, his clothes had ripped and torn. Basically, clothes were completely separate from the morphing process, which was about what you’d expect, if it was based on a genetic scan. Except—

“Elfangor’s clothes,” I said. “Where’d they come from?”

Marco shrugged. “He probably had some stashed away, right? I mean, he’d morphed human before.”

“Those weren’t human clothes, though,” I said.

There was a long pause as everyone gave me the same blank look. “What?” I asked, a little defensively. “They weren’t. The seams were totally weird—they were in all the wrong places, and they didn’t look like they were held together by thread.”

“Leave it to Rachel to pick up on the finer points of intergalactic fashion design,” Jake said dryly.

“Excuse me,” Cassie interrupted, holding up a hand. “I don’t mean to butt in, but can we back up for a minute? I mean, we’ve been doing experiments and figuring stuff out all morning, but we haven’t even stopped to talk about the big picture.”

“What big picture?” I asked.

“Everything!” Cassie said, and suddenly her voice was no longer strong and steady. “All that stuff that Marco was talking about last night! The alien invasion going on in our hometown! Mr. Chapman infesting those police officers! You guys are talking about bullets and—and rescue missions to the middle of the ocean, and we just watched someone get _eaten_ , and—we’re just a bunch of teenagers in a barn! What are we going to _do?_ What’s the _plan?”_

“We fight,” I said.

“Fight _who?_ Fight _how?_ None of us know anything about how to—to _wage war_. I haven’t ever even _punched_ anybody. And how are we supposed to fight anything when we can’t even leave the house without telling our parents where we’re going? This is too big, you guys. Too big. We—we could _die._ Elfangor _died._ Those cops got turned into slaves _right in front of us._ How are we supposed to do anything about _any_ of this?”

“Okay,” Jake said, springing to his feet and holding out both hands. “Everybody hang on a sec. Please. Just hang on and take a deep breath.” He looked around the circle for consent, then nodded grimly. “Okay. First off—Cassie, you’re right. We need to start at the beginning. And we need to go slow, so that we all have a chance to talk.”

He paused again, glancing at each of us in turn. “Anybody mind if I talk first?”

“You’re in charge, boss-man,” Marco quipped.

Jake winced, and I raised my hand. “Actually,” I said, “that’s maybe the first thing we need to figure out. Who _is_ in charge?”

“Aren’t we all in charge?” Tobias asked. “Democracy, and all that?”

“Democracy means voting,” Marco pointed out. “Which means majority rule, which means if it’s four against you, you shut your mouth and toe the line.”

“I’m not doing anything just because the four of you tell me to,” Cassie said, and there was steel beneath the tremble in her voice.

“Stop,” Jake said, and everyone fell silent again. He took a deep breath, then another, then a third. “I—okay, look. Just for right now. Just for five minutes. You all know me. Rachel, you’re my cousin. Marco, you’re my best friend. Tobias, we’ve been hanging out all year. Cassie—you trust me, right?”

Cassie nodded.

“Okay. So I’m the common link. I’m the one that everybody knows best. For the next five minutes, I’m in charge.”

He paused again, looking around the circle as if giving us a chance to object. None of us did.

“Okay. I’ll go first, then I’ll call on somebody.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, looking down at his feet, his tone neutral and flat. “Okay. Three things. First, are we even going to do this—are we going to fight.”

I felt another flicker of irritation, this one accompanied by a healthy dose of impatience. _Of course_ we were going to fight. What was the alternative—just stand there and do nothing?

But I suppressed the emotion, looking around the circle at Marco and Cassie and Tobias, looking at the weight that seemed to press down on Jake’s shoulders.

They were afraid.

“And everybody gets to make their own decision,” Jake continued. “No guilt. No pressure. We all saw what happened to Elfangor. I can’t—we can’t ask anybody to face that. Not if they aren’t ready. Nobody’s in unless they want to be.”

All four of them, terrified. Dealing with it, yeah, but the fear was there, written right across their faces where anyone could see.

Why wasn’t _I_ afraid?

Should I be afraid?

“Second, are we a team. Like, are we in this together, or not. Because if we are, we’re going to have to trust each other. And if we don’t, it’s not going to work.”

I dug down into myself, trying to get a finger on the pulse of my emotions. I had to be feeling _something,_ right?

“Third, what should we do. What’s our first step. Because we’ve got Elfangor’s brother out there somewhere, and we’ve got vice-principal Chapman, and we know the Yeerk pool is underground in the middle of town, whatever it is. And we don’t know who else we can trust.”

And then I realized. I _wasn’t_ afraid, but it wasn’t because there was no fear inside of me. It was there, deep down—a whole ocean of it. I’d just refused to let it up. Looked away from it. Covered it up with a layer of cold resolve.

Like in gymnastics, when I’d been too scared to do backflips until I’d worked myself into a frustrated rage. Like when my mom and dad got divorced, and I didn’t talk to either of them for two months. Like last night, when Tobias and Cassie had been in tears, and all I’d felt was fury.

“Fourth, I guess. Sorry. What are the rules. How do we make decisions. What are the lines we can’t cross. What do we do if one of us—if somebody—if everything goes wrong.”

Was it better to be angry? Or afraid?

I looked around the circle again.

“That’s it, I guess. Who wants to go next?”

_Angry._

I raised my hand.

“Rachel,” Jake said. “Your turn.”

I stood up. “I don’t have a whole lot to say,” I began. I deliberately kept my hands out of my pockets, kept my chin up and my eyes forward. “I’ve never been in a fight before, either. I don’t know anything about war. But right now, we’re the only ones with our eyes open. We’re the only ones who know, who are free, and Elfangor died to make that happen. Died a billion miles from home. I don’t know what good turning into a badger is going to be, but—”

I stopped and shrugged. I looked across the circle to Cassie—my best friend, and the sweetest, gentlest person I knew. “But they can’t have my sisters. And they can’t have my mom. They can’t have my dad, or my friends, or my coach. Not if there’s anything I can do to stop it. I’ll do whatever it takes—if one of you guys has a plan, count me in. But even if you don’t. Even if I’m on my own. Even if it’s hopeless. Because thanks to Elfangor, the worst they can do to _me_ is kill me. And I’m not going to run away from that—not when everybody else is up against something so much worse.”

I sat back down, and silence filled the barn.

“Anyone else?” Jake asked. Cassie raised her hand, and he nodded to her.

“I’m not arguing with any of that,” she said. “But how can you possibly fight when every single bad guy is living inside an innocent human shield?”

 

*        *        *

 

By the time we finished talking, the sun was already halfway to the horizon. Tobias left on foot, Marco on his bike. Jake stayed behind to have dinner with Cassie’s family, who would drop him off at home afterward. We had all agreed not to risk flying home—not to morph at all, unless somebody’s life was at stake.

We hadn’t accomplished much. Nobody was out, but only Jake and Marco were really in. Cassie still had too many questions that no one could answer, and Tobias had mostly stayed silent.

We’d managed to agree that Jake was our leader, although nobody really knew what that meant, least of all Jake. In the end, it had boiled down to the fact that he was the only one who linked us all together. And—as Marco pointed out—that he was pretty much doing the job already, and it was working out so far.

We were going to meet up again tomorrow afternoon, at the Gardens. Cassie was fairly certain she could get us back door access to most of the animals, and if she was wrong, we were going to use the trip to scope things out for a possible night mission afterward. Her condition: it would be a non-morphing, non-violent operation. Anything we couldn’t accomplish in our own, regular bodies would have to wait. Marco had joked that we should bring spray paint and marijuana as cover; everybody had laughed until Tobias asked how much we would need.

Somehow, that had made it all a little too real.

About halfway through the conversation, I’d started to feel that pressure again, the itch of inactivity that made me want to get up and pace, made my fingers twitch and cut my patience in half. It had grown worse and worse as the others bickered and dithered, until finally I’d had to step outside to get some fresh air. Luckily, an idea had come to me, and I’d spent the rest of the discussion fleshing out a plan in my head.

For everyone else, the war would start tomorrow.

For me, it started tonight.

My house was a couple of miles away from Cassie’s, a walk I’d done hundreds of times. There was a small boutique in a strip mall right at the halfway mark, where I’d drag Cassie every once in a while when she showed signs of being willing to wear something other than overalls. They knew me there; it wouldn’t be at all out of the ordinary to stop in on a Saturday afternoon and try on some blouses.

More importantly, their dressing room doors went all the way to the floor.

Elfangor had read our minds from inside his ship—had pulled Jake and Marco’s names right out of their heads. And whatever was actually going on with thought-speak, it had noticeable, physical effects—if words were showing up in our brains that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, then there had to be neurons firing that would have otherwise been dormant—right?

I worked through the implications as I thumbed through the racks. Andalites didn’t have a mouth. Thought-speak, for them, wasn’t technology—it was how they naturally communicated.

Right?

So they had to have some kind of organ that would let them sense—and alter—thought. That would let them monitor and manipulate the firing of neurons—or whatever it was that aliens had—in someone else’s brain. Like the way sharks could sense electric fields, only in both directions.

Which meant that maybe—just _maybe—_ we could figure out a way to detect Controllers from a distance.

I headed for the dressing room, armed with enough items to guarantee myself at least half an hour of privacy. I felt a slight twinge of guilt over the fact that I was _already_ breaking my agreement not to morph, but I pushed it aside. Besides, technically, I was justified—lives _were_ at stake.

Three of them, to start with.

It was cramped in the dressing room. Elfangor’s centaur-scorpion body was easily six feet long, not counting the tail. But I didn’t need to move—I just needed to _think_.

<ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.>

I closed my four eyes and sat as still as I could, feeling the hyperconscious Andalite brain ticking and churning away beneath my own stream of thought. I reached out, visualizing the brains of the people around me, hoping to catch a glimpse, an echo, a spark.

<ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.>

Nothing.

I tried relaxing instead of focusing, letting my own mind recede, allowing the Andalite brain to take over. It was like turning my thoughts over to a computer—I could feel my reaction time shrinking, feel my attention dividing into multiple tracks, each capable of running at full efficiency. But there was nothing _new_ there—no new senses, no ESP.

<ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.>

Frustrated, I resisted the impulse to lash my tail back and forth. There was something I wasn’t seeing, some missing piece to the puzzle. Maybe there wasn’t an organ for listening to other people’s thoughts at all? Just the projector—just the “voice,” and it worked on top of whatever inner monologue was there to begin with?

_But Elfangor knew Jake’s name. It sounded like he knew_ exactly _what Jake was thinking._

<ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.>

Sighing inwardly, I began to demorph.

_Giving up already?_

No. But I was pushing it already, morphing in a public place, and there was no sense in risking it any longer than I had to.

Besides, I had a Plan B.

One of my neighbors, Mr. King, used to work as a dog trainer for the local police department before he retired. Whenever one of the dogs got too old or got injured on the job, he’d take it in. He usually had about six or seven of them living in his big, fenced-in backyard.

Every now and then, I’d run into him as he and his wife or his son—a kid named Erek, who was in my grade—walked them around the neighborhood. The last time, I’d gotten an earful about his newest acquisition, a German Shepherd named Buzz who’d recently torn a ligament bringing down a drug smuggler on the other side of the city.

A drug smuggler they’d identified when Buzz sniffed out the traces of cocaine from a shipment the guy had moved _two days earlier._

I’d heard about dogs who could take one sniff of a person, and tell if they had cancer. My mom had told me about dogs that were trained to bark a warning whenever their diabetic owners’ blood sugar dropped too low.

I was willing to bet that Buzz would have no trouble sniffing out an evil alien slug sitting in the back of my vice-principal’s head.

One hour later, and I was lying on my paws on the sidewalk in front of Mr. Chapman’s house, a cheap, dollar store collar loose around my neck, absorbing the warmth from the last rays of sunshine.

I hadn’t brought it up in front of the others, but Melissa Chapman had been a friend of mine since elementary school. We’d been on the same gymnastics team for years, and had spent entire summers sleeping over at one another’s houses. We’d drifted apart since I’d started hanging out with Cassie, but she was still one of the most important people in my life. She knew me better than anyone, had helped me through my parents’ divorce, knew the passwords to all my accounts.

And her father was an alien slave.

As I waited, watching the sun slip below the horizon, a fierce battle raged inside me. Half of me wanted to believe that Melissa was safe, that the Yeerks didn’t have any use for her this early in the invasion, that I’d have _noticed_ if they’d taken her. The other half had already gone cold as ice, and was planning ahead.

To how I would kidnap her, and take her away.

To how I’d hold her, somewhere up in the mountains, until the Yeerk in her head died of _kandrona_ starvation.

To how I’d give her the morphing power, and make her our first recruit.

To how we’d come back, and take her parents, and set them free, too.

But first, I had to be sure.

It was twilight by the time Mr. Chapman’s mini-van pulled into their driveway, coming back from their weekly family dinner out. Leaping to my feet, I let out a friendly bark and began wagging my tail. As the doors opened, the German Shepherd brain seemed to hesitate, a wordless question forming in my head.

_Friend?_

I stepped forward cautiously, nostrils flaring. With a smile, Mr. Chapman reached down, holding out his fingers. I licked them gently, and he scratched me on my forehead.

_Yes,_ I told the dog brain. _Friend._ But I continued to sniff, my human brain digging through the information as quickly as it could.

Buzz’s sense of smell was nothing short of extraordinary. Lying there on the sidewalk, I had been able to detect every single person and animal that had passed by since the last rain, a week earlier. I’d been able to smell the food in each of the nearby houses, the water running through the sewers under the street, the gasoline burning in the cars driving by. I could pick apart odors as easily as my human eyes could pick apart colors, and there were if anything _more_ smells than there were shades.

But Buzz’s animal brain didn’t come equipped with a dictionary. There was no way for it to tell “natural” from “unnatural.” The suburban world was a crazy mix of organic and artificial, with plenty of perfectly ordinary smells that would have been utterly alien to a wild dog who’d grown up in some forest somewhere.

So I’d expected it to be difficult—maybe impossible—to identify the smell of Yeerk on my first pass. Especially since I didn’t really know if all three Chapmans were infested—a strange smell coming from all three of them might have just meant that they all used the same detergent or the same shampoo or whatever.

There was one thing, though, that my dog brain was entirely qualified to detect. Something that millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of breeding had made automatic, instinctive, and immediate.

Mr. Chapman was _terrified._

It was subtle. Suppressed, as if the Yeerk inside was tampering with the process, shutting down the pathways by which the fear would express itself as sweat and hormones and dilated pupils. I probably would have never noticed, as a human. But to Buzz, it was like an alarm bell. I struggled to maintain control, to keep Buzz’s hackles from going up, to keep his own empathetic response from taking over. _Friend,_ I told myself firmly, and I forced myself to roll over onto my back, exposing my belly. Mr. Chapman laughed and began rubbing my short, clean fur.

Melissa and her mother came around from the other side of the van. “Who’s this?” Mrs. Chapman asked.

Melissa crouched down, offering me her fingers. _Friend_ , I told the dog brain again, as I leaned forward and sniffed.

Fear.

Rage.

Despair.

“Must belong to one of the new neighbors,” Mr. Chapman said. “There’s no tag on the collar.”

I sprang to my feet again, letting out another short bark and bowing onto my elbows as if eager to play. Mr. Chapman laughed again, and Melissa turned back to the van, reaching inside and rummaging around for a moment before drawing out a tennis ball.

“Here, boy,” she said, her voice sounding perfectly normal and happy. “Fetch!”

I reared up onto my hind legs, maintaining the illusion as rage threatened to shatter my control. She threw the ball, and I was after it like a shot, snatching it out of the air and racing back toward the three of them, where I dropped it and began sprinting in circles around the minivan.

_My friend._

They’d taken my friend.

Taken her, and her father, and her mother. Taken three people I’d known since I was a little girl. People I’d eaten with, gone on vacations with, shared Christmas mornings with. Trapped inside their own heads, not even able to scream.

Melissa threw the ball again, and I tore after it, this time continuing to run after I caught it in my jaws. “Hey!” Melissa shouted. “That’s not yours, boy!”

But I ignored her, cutting across yards and leaping past hedges until I was half a dozen blocks away. Only then did I relinquish my iron grip on the dog’s instincts, allowing my anger to bleed through, allowing Buzz’s hackles to rise and his lips to curl back, allowing his instincts to lead us to a dark hedge corner, where we didn’t have to worry about anything sneaking up behind us.

It was funny. The German Shepherd’s reaction to fear was basically identical to my own. Buzz wasn’t cowering, he was _coiling._ Preparing to strike, to lash out.

He didn’t want to run. He wanted to fight.

I waited for a few minutes, letting my anger turn from fire to ice, feeling the lightning draining out of my canine veins. Padding back toward Melissa’s, I began circling the neighborhood, checking for other signs of infestation. I stopped to greet three kids, one old lady, and a couple out for a walk. No trace of that sick, suppressed fear.

Just the Chapmans, then.

I slipped into the yard of the house behind theirs, lying down out of view behind a stack of firewood. Marco had said that thought-speak had a range of about three hundred yards, and that it would auto target, being heard only by the intended recipients.

I focused on Melissa and her parents, mentally excluding the Yeerks they were carrying. The alien slugs would hear it anyway—they’d have to. But if my guess was right, they’d be unable to tell it apart from any other thought. It would sound just like Melissa, just like Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, my message translated into their own internal voices, just as Elfangor’s voice had been translated into mine.

<Enjoy it while you can, Yeerk,> I thought. <The Andalites are coming.>


	4. Cassie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Disaster strikes, sending Cassie on a solo mission resulting in first contact with the Yeerks.

 

**Chapter 04: Cassie**

I want to say that I never asked for any of this. That I wish it could all go back to the way it was.

Both of my parents are veterinarians, you know. I’m going to be one too, someday. I’ve been dealing with death since I was a toddler. Looking it right in the face, in all its ugly, sad, unfair detail. More than Marco, more than Jake, more than Tobias and Rachel, I knew what was coming if we decided to fight in this war. And while I maybe didn’t understand exactly how horrible it would be, I _understood_ how little I understood. I could see the gap where that awful knowledge would go. And I want to say I’d give up _anything_ to stop myself from learning it.

But if I’m honest with myself—really, truly honest—then I can’t. Because even knowing what was coming, I was _happy._ Happy in a way I’d never thought I’d be. Happy in a way I’m not sure I could _ever_ decide to give up.

And I’d definitely asked for it. Prayed for it. Wished for it a thousand times over.

I don’t know what that says about me, as a person. Probably not much. I mean, everybody’s got _something_ they’d give it all up for, right? Everybody’s got a price.

If I really had time to think about it—if some genie showed up and said, you can stop this war right now, and all you have to do is give up the morphing power—well, I’d _probably_ make the right decision.

But it hurts to know how bitter I’d be. To know that, deep down inside, I’m _not_ that good of a person. That the kind, caring, empathetic face I show the world is only half the story, and if I cared _just a little bit less_ , I might sacrifice the freedom of the whole human race, just so that I could feel the wind in my mane, hear the thunder of my hooves as I raced across the fields beyond my family’s property.

_So fast._

I’d never felt so fast. So strong. So capable. Peppermint’s body— _my_ body—was a thousand pounds of lean, liquid muscle. I felt like I could run for days, like I could kick a hole through concrete, like I could leap tall buildings in a single bound. For the first time in my life, I was starting to understand what it was like to be Rachel, out there on the gymnastics floor. I was the embodiment of power.

And yet, at the same time, I was at peace. There was no anger in the horse’s mind. No ego, no malice. She was happy to be running, happy to rest, happy to nibble at the grass in the cool morning sunshine. She was content just to live, with nothing to prove and no battles to win.

I would have stayed that way forever, if I could have.

<Cassie!> came the voice in my head. <Cassie, if that’s you, don’t screw around. I’m not going to rat you out to Jake. But I need to talk to you _right now._ We are in crisis mode as of twenty minutes ago. >

I slowed to a trot and looked up at the sky, unable to stop myself from tossing my head. A single bird of prey was arrowing across the blue, its wings pumping like a sparrow’s, its flight unnaturally straight. <It’s me,> I said, feeling my human heart sink behind the curtain of Peppermint’s calm.

<Barn. Demorph. Now. I’ll watch out for your parents.>

 

*        *        *

 

I dragged the overalls out from the cabinet where they’d been sitting for months, the fabric stiff and crusted with mud and poop from half a dozen species. “Sorry,” I said, as I handed them over the stall door.

“Doesn’t matter,” Marco replied. His voice was tight, his sentences clipped. Throwing the overalls on, he emerged from the stall without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, stopping right in front of me and looking straight into my eyes. “Cassie. I’m about to make you freak, okay? I’m going to say some words, and you’re going to want to freak. But you can’t freak, okay? We do not have time for freaking right now. I need you to promise that you’ll hold it together even after I’ve given you a really, really good reason not to.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again and swallowed. Suddenly the barn felt hot and airless. “Why are you here, Marco?” I asked slowly. “Why are you here instead of Jake or Rachel? Why are you talking to me instead of _to_ Jake or Rachel?”

Marco reached out and put a hand on each of my shoulders. “Promise, Cassie. Say the words.”

And that’s when I felt it. Felt the first glimmers of understanding as the world disappeared out from under me.

 _Don’t act like you didn’t see this coming, girl,_ said the only part of me that wasn’t reeling. _It was_ always _going to be too soon—you know that. No such thing as right on time. Not with something like this._

I tried to take a deep breath, but I could only get about half of one. “I promise,” I croaked, not sure why he thought it would make a difference.

“Melissa Chapman and her parents are dead.”

There was a complicated half second, during which the world unexploded, started to celebrate, then took a hammer blow that left it cracked and listing. Amazingly, I felt myself keeping my promise, and my hands were steady as they gently lifted Marco’s off my shoulders. “How?” I asked, my voice level.

 _Oh, my God. You don’t even_ care _, do you? It wasn’t Jake or Rachel, so no big deal?_

“Car accident. Head-on collision, late last night. This morning, technically.”

“How did you—I mean, where did you—”

“I’ve had the news going nonstop since Friday, and I’ve been checking the internet every half hour, just in case. It was on Channel Eight a few minutes ago—seven AM round-up.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “Do you think Rachel—”

“I don’t know,” Marco interrupted. “Probably not. But that’s going to be Jake’s job, okay? That’s why I’m here. There’s something else you have to do, and it has to be today.”

I could feel my thoughts starting to spin as shock, relief, and self-hatred settled in and began chasing one another. “Does Jake know yet?” I asked.

“No. I’m going to his house next, and we’re going to go to Rachel’s together. But _you_ , Cassie”—he shifted, and I felt his hands slip into mine—“you’ve got to go to the Gardens.”

“What? Why?”

“This is the Yeerks, Cassie. Or at least, we have to _assume_ it’s them, nothing else makes sense. All three Chapmans, in a car wreck at two in the morning? And whatever they’re up to, it’s not good news for us.”

“But why—”

“ _Think_ , Cassie. This weekend, we don’t go because of the news, next weekend we don’t go because of the funeral. Two weeks until we get anything bigger than a badger? No go. Things are accelerating, and we haven’t even started moving yet.”

“But I—”

“You’re the only one who can pull it off, Cassie. Tell them—tell them you don’t want to think about it, you can’t handle talking about it, you just—want to be with the animals for a day. Just one day. They’ll give it to you. They’ll let you go anywhere in the zoo, today, probably places they wouldn’t even let you go normally. You’ll be able to acquire any animal you need, and then we can copy them off you. You can—you can _use_ this.”

Something must have been happening to my face, because Marco quailed, his jaw trembling as he let go of my hands and took a step back. “I know,” he said. “I _know_ , okay? And if it makes you feel any better, I knew that Jake—that you—”

He stopped, took a breath, and started over, not quite managing to look me in the eye. “If Jake were here, I’d explain it to him, and when I was finished, he’d ask you to do it. He’d ask you, and you’d hate him, you’d hate him for being the one to say the words, but you’d _do_ it because you _see_ , don’t you? You _know_ it’s the right move. So I figured—figured I’d save you both the trouble.” He gave a hollow little laugh. “After all, it’s not like _our_ friendship was going anywhere special. Sorry.”

And that’s when I realized that Marco didn’t know me. That he’d seen the squirrels and sparrows and overalls, and thought he’d understood. That just like Jake, he’d missed the difference between the face I showed the world—the person I _wished_ I was—and the girl I really was, deep down inside.

If a genie offered the choice to Marco, he’d make the right move in a heartbeat. I wanted to hate him for that, a little. But I couldn’t, so I just hated myself instead.

“I’ll do it,” I said, my voice still steady. “And Marco—”

He raised his eyes and looked into mine. “Yeah?”

“You don’t have to say sorry.”

 

*        *        *

 

Large bulldozer morphs—elephant, rhino, gorilla, grizzly, Canadian moose.

_Check._

Agile combat morphs—tiger, gray wolf, kangaroo, Burmese python, chimpanzee, cassowary.

_Check._

Utility morphs—black mamba, Australian ghost bat, great horned owl, great snipe, Brazilian huntsman spider, star-nosed mole, beaver, ferret, otter, skunk, polar bear, cheetah, bottle-nosed dolphin, tiger shark, dormouse, housefly, cockroach, ant.

_Check._

Marco had started to give me a list, but I’d shut him down pretty fast. He may be smart, but this was _my_ world. I knew every last inch of the animal kingdom.

The saltwater crocodile could generate over three thousand pounds of bite pressure per square inch, enough to chew through steel pipe like it was beef jerky.

The sting of the tarantula hawk—a kind of hornet—hurt so badly that for the first three minutes, people usually couldn’t even stop screaming.

The loggerhead sea turtle could hold its breath underwater the _entire time_ we were morphed.

There was a reason I wanted to be a vet.

But there was also a reason that Mom came home looking like a zombie half the time. Working with animals was hot, sweaty, _exhausting_ stuff. Over the course of the day, I’d gone through practically every exhibit, talked to nearly every handler. I’d been on my feet for almost eleven hours, racing back and forth as I tried to catch each animal during feeding time or daily checkup, and I’d spent at least ten or fifteen minutes helping out with most of them. I was beat.

And it was going to take _days_ for me to transfer all these morphs to the others.

Mom was quiet on the car ride home. I think she wasn’t quite sure what to make of my “reaction.” Melissa and I hadn’t been close—we really only knew each other through Rachel—but this was the first time one of my classmates had passed away. Knowing Mom, she was sitting on top of a big, heaping pile of parental wisdom, and was just holding back until I gave her some sort of signal that I was ready to hear it.

It was going to be a while, though. The last thing I wanted to do was listen to empty reassurances about God’s plan, and everything turning out all right in the end. I’d spent most of the day thinking about it, and Marco was right—this had to be the Yeerks, and it couldn’t mean anything good.

I leaned my head against the window and let my eyes flutter shut, the lights of the freeway tracing dim patterns on the back of my eyelids. I felt my mother’s hand reach over to pat me on the shoulder, then slide up to rub the back of my neck.

_Tzzzzzzz-ZAP._

There was a sound, a touch of pressure, and suddenly my entire body went limp, sagging into the handle of the passenger side door.

_What—_

My eyes were still closed, behind lids that might as well have been welded shut, for all I was able to move them. I tried to speak, and my jaw refused to respond, my tongue lying dead inside my mouth. Even my breathing was shallow and irregular, the contraction of my diaphragm sluggish and weak.

_Paralyzed._

My mother had touched me, and now I was paralyzed.

Which meant that—

_No._

_No no no no NO._

I felt the car swerve just a little, the way it did whenever Mom checked the GPS or looked at her phone. There was a soft click, and then something hot and wet touched my neck.

_Oh, no, oh God please no—_

I could feel myself slipping into a kind of mad panic as the hot wetness slowly began to climb upward, feeling its way along my jawline. I scrabbled frantically inside my head, trying with every last scrap of willpower to move my hand, my head, to open my mouth and scream.

They _knew._

They had taken my mother, and now they were taking me.

“Welcome back, Eldar three-two-seven,” came my mother’s voice, sudden and cold. “Orders have changed since you went into stasis. The fleet is delayed, and there is a new protocol—free spread is suspended, and no one is to travel alone.”

I felt a sliver of warmth edge its way into my ear, and realized with horror that the Yeerk inside my mother was talking to _me_ —was leaving orders in my memory, knowing that its partner would dig through my brain and find them.

“I will provide you with fourteen of our siblings,” she continued. “This host shares sleeping quarters with its mate; you will not be needed during conversion. Stand by as a backup, and prepare to take the human Jake—my host indicates he is the most appropriate primary counterpart for yours. Pass him eleven, and the following command: he is to convert his household, give each member two spares, and await further instructions. You and I, along with Onu Two-nine-nine, are to make arrangements to defend the animal collections against Andalite incursion. The Visser predicts that the Andalites will attempt to acquire Earth morphs, if they have not already.”

The sliver of warmth became a needle, threading deep into my ear, probing, pushing further than anything I’d ever felt. Then the needle thickened into a river of fire as the body of the Yeerk surged forward, tearing its way into my brain.

I felt my frantic desperation reach a peak, felt the last shreds of my composure shatter as the pressure disappeared and the Yeerk vanished into my head. _The implants!_ I screamed silently. _They were supposed to kill it!_

There was a spasm of not-quite-pain, a flash of not-quite-light and a deafening not-quite-roar. Something touched me at every point of consciousness simultaneously, a groping, questing finger poking every thought and feeling and memory at once. I heard a voice, sensed a presence, felt my eyes open at someone else’s command—

Then there was a flash of _actual_ pain, a searing, electric jolt, and everything seemed to dissolve. For a moment, I saw double, thought double, _felt_ double, and then—

Then everything was quiet.

My eyes were open, though my body was still slumped awkwardly into the space between the seat and the door. The car was still gliding smoothly down the freeway, the alien gripping the wheel with my mother’s hands.

Hardly daring to breathe, I tried closing one eyelid—my right one, the one she couldn’t see.

It worked.

It worked, and _I_ had done it.

The Yeerk was dead. Elfangor’s implant had done its job, and the paralysis was wearing off.

I could still feel the panic gripping me, the nauseating horror that threatened to close my throat and send my heart bursting through my ribcage. Any minute now, my mother would realize that something had gone wrong. She had some kind of stunner, and spare Yeerks somewhere—did she have a communicator? Some kind of panic button? Was there some code word I was supposed to give?

How much time did I have?

I watched through watery eyes as we pulled off the freeway. We were coming up the back way, away from the suburbs, taking the long, empty, twisting road that wound its way through the woods and fields.

_Come on, think of something, think think, she’s going to notice, you have to do something, you have to—_

_Have to—_

_Have to—_

_To—_

But there was nothing. My brain was spiraling, redlining, my thoughts going nowhere at a million miles per hour. I was trapped. Caught. Beaten.

— _notoriously disinterested in unusable bodies—_

They were going to kill me.

They were going to _kill_ me!

_Oh God oh God okay hang on come on what would Jake do what would Rachel—_

I flinched away.

_Marco—_

No.

“Eldar three-two-seven, report. Are you experiencing trouble with your host?”

My body went rigid, my mind suddenly, completely blank.

“Command. Ispec one-four-two reporting. Possible trouble with conversion of my host’s offspring. Currently in a car on Thistledown Road. Please track my position.”

_Lie, you’re supposed to lie, you’re supposed to LIE NOW, CASSIE—_

But fear and uncertainty had me transfixed like a deer in the headlights. I couldn’t think of anything, and so I remained silent and still as tears began to trickle down my cheeks.

“Eldar three-two-seven, I am immobilizing your host body. When you regain control, give formal confirmation.”

_Tzzzzzzz-ZAP._

This time, the paralysis only took me from the neck down, leaving my eyes open. I felt my body sag a little heavier against the door, my head knocking against the window as the car rumbled over bumps and cracks in the road. In another ten minutes, we’d be home, and then the Yeerk in my mother’s head would take my father, too.

And then they’d go after Jake.

“Command. Ispec one-four-two. No response from Eldar. I suspect the offspring is unruly. Will not proceed to host home alone; awaiting assistance.”

The car slowed, drifting, then shuddered to a halt as the tires left the asphalt and bounced into the grass and dirt of the shoulder. My mother turned off the car, and an eerie silence fell.

For a moment, the cacophony in my brain refused to follow suit, as panicked, useless thoughts continued to bounce back and forth inside my skull.

Slowly, though—oh, so slowly—a kind of clarity began to emerge, born of a helpless desperation that sucked everything else down and away.

My mother was caught.

I was caught.

My father was still free.

 _Not for long, though,_ whispered a small voice. It sounded an awful lot like Marco. _Not if you don’t get out of this car before the cavalry shows up._

But it was impossible. There was no way out.

_Unless you break the rules._

I had almost thought of it, earlier, had flinched away reflexively before the idea could take hold. If I had hit my mother while we were still driving—hit her in the face or the throat, wrestled the wheel away from her and sent the car off the road—

It was the sort of thing Rachel would have done. It was the sort of thing Jake might have done, even. It was the _obvious_ thing to do, once you took that tiny little step of admitting that my mother wasn’t worth saving anymore.

But was that an admission I was willing to make?

_Well, it doesn’t matter now. You’re paralyzed._

And it wasn’t wearing off, either. The second shock had felt no different from the first, but it had already been at least two minutes, and my body was still dead, useless, utterly unresponsive.

My _human_ body, anyway.

I felt my mouth go dry. If I morphed, would the new body be paralyzed, too? I couldn’t think of any reason why it would be.

_She’ll just shock it again, though._

And there was no way that her weapon would fail to work on an Andalite body, which is what I’d have to morph if I wanted to maintain our cover.

_Your cover is already blown. They’re going to find out you’re human about thirty seconds after they start torturing you._

If I _was_ going to break all the rules…

Could her stunner take down an elephant?

Yeerk reinforcements were on the way. I didn’t know how many, or whether they’d come in a car or from the sky. But either way, I couldn’t have much time. Minutes, maybe. Maybe less.

One slim chance.

I began to morph, focusing with all my might on channeling the changes, keeping them subtle and invisible for as long as possible. I didn’t even know if that _was_ possible—so far, every time we’d morphed it had been random and horrible. But if sheer desperation made any difference…

I could feel the inside of my body shifting and rearranging, feel the changes straining against the boundary of my skin as I fought to control them, to hold them back. The half-numb paralysis began to fade as my own stunned nerves were replaced by new ones, my frozen muscles disappearing as the elephant’s swelled in their places.

So far, I had managed to maintain my size and shape. I could feel the morphing tech resisting, growing sluggish as I pushed it further and further away from whatever default plan it wanted to follow. After thirty or forty seconds, it stopped entirely, unable to proceed in the face of my mental restrictions.

_Just the right side, maybe. Where she can’t see._

Hardly daring to breathe, I slowly started morphing again, my half-human heart thudding in my chest as the fingers on my right hand shrank and my wrist thickened until it was as big around as a coffee cup. I felt my right foot grow snug inside my shoe, felt wiry hairs sprout across the whole right side of my body.

And still my mother said nothing. Just sat in unnatural silence. I wondered if the Yeerk was talking to her—if my mother was even awake, beneath the Yeerk’s infestation.

For a second time, the morphing process ground to a halt. I was now the circus freak of the century, half girl and half elephant, my smooth, dark skin transitioning to cracked gray along the line that ran from my nose to my navel.

I took a deep, quiet breath, the air moving strangely inside my patchwork lungs. If I was right, I could finish the morph in just a little over thirty seconds. And then—

_What?_

_THEN what, Cassie?_

Every choice was intolerable. I couldn’t hit my mother, couldn’t risk accidentally killing her. Couldn’t abandon her to the Yeerks. Couldn’t stay with her, to be captured and tortured. Couldn’t take her with me—if she had stunners, a radio, and over a dozen spare Yeerks, she was bound to have some kind of tracking device.

No matter what I chose, I’d be unable to live with myself.

_Dad. You can still save Dad._

Squeezing my eyes shut, I focused once more.

_I’m sorry, Mom._

The change in size was shockingly swift, as if the morphing technology were making up for lost time. There was an almost immediate tearing sound as my shoes and clothes were reduced to tatters, and a startled “ _What—_ ” from my mother, followed by the sound of her door opening. Barely a second later, the car split open like a baked potato, the glass and metal slicing into my flesh as a ten-ton African bush elephant erupted from my thirteen-year-old frame.

“The girl!” I heard my mother shriek, as I rolled away from the wreckage and struggled to my feet, the last of my bones still stretching and grinding into place. “Cassie Withers, my host’s daughter! She just morphed into an elephant!”

There was a sound, a kind of _TSSEWWWW_ , and pain like hot knives sliced across my legs, causing one of them to buckle underneath me. I screamed in pain, the sound coming out as a trumpeted shriek.

Holding my injured leg in the air, I limped clumsily in a circle, looking for my mother. She was about twenty feet away from the ruins of our car, a strange weapon in her outstretched hand. She was frozen in place, her entire body trembling, her expression flickering back and forth between rage and determination. She looked the same way Tobias had, when he’d been caught in Elfangor’s tractor beam—like some invisible force had rooted her to the spot.

 _It’s Mom,_ I realized, and the shock was so great that even in elephant form my jaw dropped. _She’s fighting the Yeerk!_

I didn’t think. Didn’t consider the consequences. I just _acted_ , instinctively, making the only choice my conscience would allow. Stepping forward, I knocked the weapon out of her hand with my trunk and lifted her up into the air.

I was taking her with me. In three days, she’d be free.

I’d gone only a couple of steps, though, before I heard a familiar, electric sound, and suddenly my trunk went numb and limp, my mother’s body tumbling toward the asphalt below. She twisted in midair, trying to get her feet underneath her, and landed at an angle on one leg with a sickening _crack_.

<No!> I shouted, unable to stop myself. Even in the dim glow of the moonlight, I could see blood seeping through her khakis around the sharp, unnatural bend in the middle of her shin. I shook my massive head, hoping that the stunner had only delivered a momentary shock, but no—the trunk was paralyzed, every bit as useless as my human body had been.

My mother’s face contorted again as she and the Yeerk continued to battle behind her eyes. She’d gone past trembling and now looked like she was having a full-blown seizure.

“Cassie!” she screamed, her voice strained as if she were lifting a thousand pounds. “Run! Get Walter—aaaaaaaghhr _your daughter is dead, fool! And you are next!”_

I stood, still and horrified, as my mother suddenly stopped twitching, the tension draining from her body. “Finally,” she muttered, the word loud and clear in my elephant ears. She turned her eyes on me, and they blazed with an alien menace. “They always try. Sometimes they even succeed, for a time. But they all learn in the end.”

Pale and sweating, she pushed herself up to a sitting position. “So, Andalite,” she said, her voice dripping with hatred. “I see that Seerow’s work has continued. Morphing in mere seconds, and without returning to your true form in between. And after holding human form for an entire day! Visser Three will be _exceptionally_ interested in learning how you accomplished _that.”_

I hardly dared to breathe. A moment before, I had been frozen with indecision, unable to force myself to abandon my mother in the middle of the street with a broken ankle and an alien wrapped around her brain. But now, I was just confused.

It _still_ thought I was an Andalite?

“Impressive, that you found the zookeeper’s family so quickly. We were sure we had gotten to them first. Perhaps you landed before the battle? A reconnaissance mission, to infiltrate and observe? I wonder how many of you there are.”

Was it a trick? A lie, to keep me off balance until it could report back to—

Oh.

Of course.

It was _already_ reporting back to the Yeerk command. It wasn’t just stalling—its communicator had been on the whole time. That’s why it was monologuing like some cheesy cartoon villain.

Which meant it probably really _did_ think I was an Andalite.

“I congratulate you on your mimicry, by the way. As good as any Yeerk. I have looked back through my host’s memories, and she did not suspect a thing.”

Somewhere in the back of my head, Marco was laughing. It all made sense, as long as you started with all the wrong assumptions. I remembered Elfangor’s coldness, his arrogance, his reluctance. His willingness to slaughter us all, just to prevent us from becoming pawns in his war with the Yeerks.

Humanity wasn’t a player in this war. We were _inventory._ Cattle. Beneath consideration. If you saw a cow firing a rocket launcher, you wouldn’t think, _Who gave that cow a rocket launcher?_ You’d think, _How’d they make such a good cow costume?_

A huge breakthrough in morphing technology was impossible. A human with the ability to morph was, to a Yeerk, _inconceivable._

It was a miraculous, glorious, incredibly lucky mistake. And with a sinking feeling, I realized I knew exactly how to capitalize on it.

All I had to do was break my mother’s heart, and abandon her to her fate. Save myself, and walk away.

_Not just yourself. You can still save Dad._

<Your host is as blind and stupid as the rest of her backward species,> I said, pouring as much contempt and derision into the words as I could. <We took her daughter weeks ago, and she never even noticed.>

I turned away from my home and began limping back the way we’d come as the Yeerk threw back my mother’s head and laughed.

 

*        *        *

 

Ten minutes in a car at fifty-five miles per hour meant my house was about nine miles away by road. It would take an elephant hours to cover that distance even _without_ an injured leg. As soon as I had hobbled out of sight, I demorphed and remorphed.

The European great snipe can travel over four thousand miles _nonstop_ , at an average speed of sixty miles per hour, crossing whole continents in days. And if I ignored the road and cut across the forest, I could be home in no time.

How long had I lingered with my mother? It had to have been at least a couple of minutes, plus three or four more in the car. Add in the time it had taken me to change form, and it had been over ten minutes since the Yeerk’s first request for backup. Maybe seven or eight since she’d reported my morphing.

I didn’t know how long it took the Yeerks to mobilize. If they’d gone straight for the house, I might already be too late. But there was a chance that my misdirection had worked—that they believed I’d gone the other way. A true Andalite would have no interest in the last member of the Withers family.

I rose into the air, my wings pumping seven times per second as I arrowed straight toward my house. I stayed low and close to the treetops, eyes alert for any sign of Bug fighters sliding across the field of stars.

If I’d had human eyes, I wouldn’t have been able to see through the tears. The words _too soon, too soon_ kept running through my head, a ringtone on repeat.

Could I have saved my mother?

Probably not. But then, I hadn’t really even _tried._ The Yeerk had paralyzed my trunk, and I’d dropped her, and then I’d simply given up. Just like I’d given up in the car, when I’d refused to let myself consider running us off the road.

Because I was afraid. Because I wasn’t clever. Because I didn’t _want_ to be clever—not if being clever meant being like Marco or Rachel. I didn’t want to have to choose between my father’s life and my mother’s, or between both their lives and my own. I didn’t want to be the sort of person who could calmly consider killing her own mother, even to save the whole planet.

Because that’s what I _should_ have done, I knew. That’s what the Yeerks would have expected, what any real Andalite would have done. From their perspective, my mother was just another tool, and by leaving her behind, I’d missed my chance to deny the Yeerks an important resource.

I might have just blown our cover anyway.

But what was the _point,_ if that was how we had to fight? What would we be saving, if we gave up our humanity to win? If we became cold and dark and unfeeling, just to survive?

I climbed a little higher in the sky, fighting for altitude in the cold, dead air. The lights of my house were just barely visible, maybe a couple of miles away. I couldn’t be sure, but there didn’t seem to be any unusual activity. No extra cars in the driveway, no spacecraft hovering overhead.

Wait.

I rose higher, angling for a true bird’s eye view.

There were no cars in the driveway at _all._ The harsh blue floodlights shone down on broken weeds and empty gravel.

I’d thought I was already flying as fast as possible, but somehow I managed an extra burst of effort, my muscles trembling as I pushed them to the limit. Dad was supposed to be home—he’d _said_ he was staying home, all day, to keep an eye on the raccoon with the punctured lung, he wouldn’t have left except—

I staggered in midflight, my wings losing their rhythm, dropping twenty feet before I could recover.

He wouldn’t have left except for an emergency.

Like if Mom had called him to say that our car had been totaled on the way home.

I felt a scream start up in the back of my head, a long, wordless keen of anguish and dread. I’d left her there _conscious,_ left her with her purse just a few feet away, with a cell phone and stunners and Yeerk reinforcements incoming—

I banked like a fighter jet, veering off course, turning back toward the winding road. Dad’s beat-up old pickup was twenty years old; it could barely go forty miles per hour.

_How long? How long ago did she call him?_

I could head straight for the road and be there in thirty seconds, a mile and a half from the house. Or I could head back to my mother, get there in maybe three minutes, _nine_ miles from the house. Or anything in between. I couldn’t see the road itself from the air—the trees were too thick, the angle too shallow for headlights to shine through.

The scream in my head became an actual warbling cry, cutting the night air as I struck out for the middle, unable to decide. I tore across the sky, angling slightly downward for every last possible scrap of speed. <DAD!> I broadcast, just barely remembering to restrict my thoughts so that only he could hear. <DAD, STOP THE CAR! WHEREVER YOU ARE, STOP THE CAR _NOW! >_

Time seemed to slow as I raced toward the break in the forest, the distance stretching out in front of me. As I neared the road, I banked again, shooting past the treetops and zooming along the yellow lines like a missile, twice as fast as Peppermint had ever run.

Empty.

Empty.

_Empty._

I tore around the curves, occasionally rising back over the treetops as I cut across the larger bends. I had hit the road about four miles away from where I’d left my mother, and now I was only two miles out.

Nothing.

I started to call out in thought-speak again, then realized with a shiver of fear just how deeply stupid I had been. If they’d already caught him, or if they caught him _after_ he’d heard my desperate pleading—

_Shut up and fly._

A mile and three quarters.

Nothing.

A mile and a half.

Nothing.

A mile and a quarter.

Nothing.

One mile away from where I had left my mother, the road curved into a long straightaway, and for a moment I thought I saw brakelights at the far end, disappearing around the next bend.

 _Please,_ I begged. I didn’t know if I was talking to God, or to the universe, or just to myself. I didn’t even have the words for what I wanted. Just _please._

But the answer was no. As I came around the final turn and flitted up into the trees, I saw my father’s truck, parked at an angle next to an ambulance, a fire engine, and two police cars, the lights still on and the driver’s side door hanging open. My mother was on a stretcher, sitting upright as she talked to one of the police officers, and my father was on the ground, lying motionless as everyone else moved around him like he wasn’t even there. There was a streak of slime on the side of his face, leading to his ear, glimmering blue and red in the wild, flickering light of the police cars. After a minute, he twitched, then stood up and walked over to the wreck, where four firefighters were cutting my mother’s car into chunks with what looked like acetylene torches.

He didn’t even glance at my mother.

_Too soon, too soon._

_It was always going to be too soon._

I don’t know how I made it out of there. I don’t remember where I went. I must have demorphed and remorphed at least once, because it was almost three in the morning by the time I found myself fluttering onto a branch outside of Jake’s window.

<Cassie? Is that you?>

There was an owl perched on the ridge of the roof. I hadn’t even noticed it.

<Jake,> I thought. I didn’t have the strength to add any other words.

<Tobias, actually. Thank God—Jake’s been losing it. He’s been looking for you all night. We thought—when you didn’t come back to the barn, we weren’t—>

<The barn,> I interrupted. <You can’t—>

I broke off, unable to say it, to force my brain to put together the thought. I wished I didn’t _have_ to put it together, that there were some way for Tobias to simply _know._ He should’ve known already—should have noticed that the world had stopped spinning.

<It’s my parents,> I said finally, knowing that nothing would ever be the same again. <They’ve been taken.>


	5. Tobias

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tobias' upbringing and outlook put him at odds with the decisions of Jake, et al.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter marks the first appearance of the F-bomb. Having spent a full year as a thirteen-year-old, I would argue that it's still PG-13, but heads-up if you disagree.
> 
> It should be mentioned that characters who TRY to be rational don't always succeed, and even those who do can still sometimes reach the wrong conclusions. Mistakes are a part of the fabric of reality, and our dear r!Animorphs are still at the start of a steep learning curve.

**Chapter 05: Tobias**

 

_“This is my family.”_

“I _know_ that, okay? But Jake—look—listen—think it through, man. The Yeerks _know_ that we know that they were coming after your family next. Don’t you think they’ll be a _little_ suspicious, if all of a sudden the four of you just up and disappear? It’s not like Andalites would care one way or the other.”

I was forty feet up, perched in a tree, still in owl morph as I kept watch. The scene below was incredibly clear to my predator senses, as if it were lit up by spotlights and covered in microphones. I could see Jake, his jaw set, his eyes glinting in the light of the distant streetlamp. I could see Marco, whose tone was growing more and more brittle as the long night wore on. I could see Cassie, a short distance away, sobbing quietly into Rachel’s shoulder, and Rachel, whose face might as well have been carved from stone.

“Besides,” Marco continued, still whispering softly enough that the girls couldn’t hear. “From what Cassie said, it sounds like they only wanted you as cover for _her._ Since she’s—”

He broke off, glancing over his shoulder. “Since she’s dead, they might not even bother.”

The four of them were hunkered down in a tiny patch of woods in the space between two backyards, a few houses down from where Jake lived. They were shivering slightly in the cold, naked except for the towels and blankets that Jake had smuggled out of his house, their breath forming little puffs of mist.

“We are _not_ ,” Jake bit out, each word icy and sharp, “doing _nothing._ ”

To me, his clenched fists were a beacon, plainly visible. To Marco, they probably just looked like shadows.

“Then _what_ , Jake? What _are_ we doing? Because we don’t even have a place to stash _Cassie,_ let alone Tom and your parents. And unless you’re ready to spill the beans on _all_ of it, how exactly do you propose to get them all to pack up and leave in the middle of the night?”

The day had started with Rachel crying, had turned into a frantic search that had _Jake_ crying, had transitioned into Cassie crying, and now looked like it was headed for a fistfight between Jake and Marco.

At four in the goddamn morning.

<Just light it on fire,> I said wearily.

They both twitched, looking up in the wrong direction, and I rustled my wings to show my position. <I mean, if we just want to get them out of the house without saying anything.>

“You got a lighter, or are we rubbing two sticks together?” Marco shot back, no longer whispering. He turned back to Jake. “Listen, we can’t just—”

“Then we cause a distraction,” Jake said, cutting him off. “We go on the offensive. Turn up the heat so they don’t have _time_ to worry about tying up loose ends.”

“How? The only Controllers we know by sight are Cassie’s parents. You want to turn up the heat on _them?”_

“There’s the firefighters,” Jake said stubbornly. “The cops. Probably the teachers and the principal, since Cassie’s mom said they aren’t allowed to be alone. Which means at least one other person at the Gardens, too.”

“Yeah, but _which ones?”_

“Cassie,” Rachel whispered urgently, as Jake and Marco continued to argue. I swiveled my head to look down at them. “Which breeds of dog might be able to sniff out a Yeerk?”

“—if we stake out the station—”

“We’ve got _school_ tomorrow—”

“Mom said it was going to be cancelled, out of respect—”

I watched as Cassie sniffed, gulped, squeezed her eyes shut for a moment before answering in a shaky murmur. “German Shepherd. Labs. Spaniels. Vizslas. Border collies. Doesn’t matter, really—they’ve all been used in cancer research. I guess bloodhounds would be the best.”

“Guys,” Rachel called out, interrupting Marco mid-rant. “We could use a German Shepherd morph to sniff out Controllers.”

The boys fell silent. “Cassie,” Jake said, his voice suddenly soft and gentle. “Would that actually work?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Marco cut in. “We’d have to get close enough without raising suspicions, and that’s _not going to happen_ now that the Yeerks are on alert.”

<Weren’t we trying to decide whether or not to save Jake’s family?> I asked.

“Actually, what we should be talking about is how to rescue _Cassie’s_ family,” Rachel interjected.

“No, we should be talking about how to save the frigging _planet_ ,” Marco hissed. “Which is a _much bigger deal_ than _anyone’s_ family.”

Silence fell, and I found myself wishing I had hands to applaud with.

Up until two days ago, I’d never really paid any attention to Marco. He was just this wiseass kid that Jake liked to hang around with, the kind of guy who laughs at his own jokes and then acts like anyone who doesn’t laugh didn’t get it. I’d put up with him because he and Jake were a package deal, and Jake had seemed like the kind of guy you wanted on your side when social services dumped you into a new school in the middle of September.

Now, though, I was starting to see that Marco went a whole lot deeper than he let on. Yeah, he was just another spoiled suburban softie, but he _got_ it, you know? He saw through the bullshit, understood how the world _really_ worked. Drop Jake or Rachel or Cassie on the wrong side of the tracks, and they’d be conned, mugged, and left for dead before they ever figured out the grownups weren’t coming to save them. Jake and Rachel and Cassie still thought rules were a thing.

Marco, though—Marco knew the score. Which was pretty much the only reason I hadn’t taken off already. Spend enough time out on your own, and you learn pretty quick that some kinds of friends are worse than no friends at all.

<Can we at least agree that keeping _us_ out of the Yeerks’ hands is the most important thing right now? > I asked. <I mean, if it comes down to a choice between you and your parents—>

“Our parents are a _part_ of staying out of the Yeerks’ hands,” Jake said flatly. “If they get taken, we either get captured along with them, or we get exposed. We’re on thin ice with Cassie as it is, and there’s no guarantee they aren’t just playing along for some reason or other. We need to decide what we’re doing about this _yesterday._ ” He took a deep breath and crossed his arms. “Options. Everybody.”

“Recruit,” Rachel answered immediately. “We have the cube. Give them the power, and they’re that much better able to protect themselves.”

“They’re not Yeerk-proof, though,” Marco pointed out. “Even _one_ of them goes down, and it’s all over. Better to just get them out of Dodge—there’s only one Yeerk pool, and it’s here. Anything outside the county is probably safe for the next few months.”

“Yeah, but what could we possibly tell them to convince them to get up and go?” Jake asked. “Even if we told them the truth, what’s stopping them from just deciding they know better than us? Telling the cops, or going public?”

“Maybe we _should_ go public,” Rachel said. “I mean, if the Yeerks want this invasion to stay secret, then we don’t—right?”

<Unless it’s like, they’re being secret because they want seven billion hosts, and they know an all-out war would end up killing half the planet,> I put in. <But maybe they’d still rather have _three_ billion than walk away empty-handed. We go public, we could kick off the apocalypse. >

“Or just get laughed at, more likely,” Marco muttered. “So far, it looks like they’re doing this thing smart, and if they’ve already got the police, then they’ve probably got the media, too.” He scrubbed at his eyes. “Then again, they’re here picking up zookeepers instead of in Washington nabbing Senators, so maybe they’re not _that_ smart.”

“Actually,” Jake put in, “there’s a problem there. Why did they take Cassie’s mother in the first place?”

<It makes sense, doesn’t it?> I answered. <I mean, the Gardens _is_ the obvious place to pick up new morphs. >

“Yeah, but why would they be worried about Andalite bandits at all? From the way Elfangor was talking, the Yeerks won the space battle hands-down. And it’s not like _we’ve_ done anything to get on their radar.”

<Maybe they’re just paranoid?>

“Or maybe,” Marco said, his voice suddenly taut, “maybe there _are_ Andalite bandits. I mean, _something_ stirred them up, right? We already know Elfangor’s brother is out there somewhere. What if _another_ ship made it through? We could have allies down here.”

I heard Rachel suck in a breath, felt the owl’s feathers fluff and stand on end. That would change _everything_ —

“No,” Cassie said, speaking up for the first time. Her voice was a hoarse croak, and she bit her lip as Jake and Marco turned to look at her. “Not allies. They’re fighting to beat the Yeerks. We’re fighting to save Earth. That’s—those are two different things.”

She lapsed back into silence, and a grim silence followed as we all worked through the ramifications. I found myself remembering Elfangor’s cold assessment of the situation, his solemn declaration. _You are the wave they will ride as they sweep the galaxy clean of all who oppose them._

Maybe we _should_ kick off an all-out war. Maybe a few billion dead humans was exactly what the galaxy needed.

I looked down at the others again. Cassie, returned to her quiet weeping, and Jake, pacing back and forth like a caged tiger. Marco, his frustration written in the set of his shoulders and the thin line of his lips. Rachel, uncharacteristically silent. All of them shaken, on the verge of falling apart, and Cassie’s parents weren’t even _dead._

I shook my head, fighting to think through the haze of sleep deprivation. The sun would be up in two hours. There were only two possibilities—either the Yeerks were already closing in, or they weren’t even coming. And in either case, _this?_

This wasn’t helping.

The little voice in the back of my head—the one that told me when to move my money out of my wallet and into my sock, the one that knew exactly which couples wanted an orphan for all the wrong reasons, the one that had first told me to make friends with Jake—that voice had been getting louder and louder as the day wore on.

_These people are a mess._

_You don’t owe them anything._

_They’re not going to make it, and they’re going to drag you down with them._

_Get out while you still can._

I looked through the trees, through the dark windows of the nearest house, to the clock on the microwave in the distant kitchen. I had forty minutes left in morph.

<Look,> I said, breaking the silence. <I know I’m not exactly qualified to have an opinion, here. I don’t have parents or brothers or sisters to worry about. So stop me if I’m being rude.>

I paused, but they just looked up at me, shoulders slumped and faces drawn. <But Cassie’s parents—they’re _safe_ now, aren’t they? I mean, I know being Controlled can’t be fun, but—the Gardens—they’re important people—the Yeerks are going to protect them, keep them alive. And as long as they’re alive, there’s hope, right? >

“Tell that to the Chapmans,” Marco growled.

Rachel winced as if punched, and I hastened to clarify. <I’m just saying, it’s just a matter of time, isn’t it? I mean, one way or another, they’re going to come after your families. Doesn’t even have to be personal. They’re coming after _everybody_. So you might as well decide right now, right? Either get them out now—tonight—or go ahead and accept that it’s going to happen, and let it. >

“There’s still that little problem of what happens when they send a squad out to pick up Tom and Jake and Mr. and Mrs. Berenson, and they come back with just Tom and the grownups and a story about Jake turning into a pigeon and flying away,” Marco said dryly.

<Only if there are four people in the house when the Yeerks come calling,> I pointed out. <If you can’t think of a way to get _them_ out, why not get _you_ guys out? Fake your deaths, or run away, or whatever? The Yeerks show up a month from now, and there’s no link. >

“There’s still a link,” Jake said. “Even if we assume they bought Cassie’s story, they _have_ to be suspicious. If all of her friends start disappearing, one by one…”

<So don’t _start_ with her friends. Start by disappearing some _other_ kids, somebody completely unconnected. You guys could be, like, three, five, seven, and nine out of ten. >

“Aaaand we’re back to recruiting,” said Marco.

<You’ve got to do _something,_ > I snapped. <Sitting here in the woods bickering until the Yeerks show up is _not a plan._ >

“Fine,” Jake said. He stopped pacing and folded his arms. “We vote.”

“I thought that wasn’t—”

“We vote first, _then_ argue about whether or not this should be decided by a vote. A, we get all our families out, tonight, and start working on a plan to rescue Cassie’s parents. B, we start figuring out how to get _ourselves_ out. C, we try to figure out a strategy for staying in place.” He paused. “Anybody care to speak up first?”

No one spoke. “Fine,” he repeated. “I vote A.”

<B,> I countered.

Marco and Rachel turned to look toward each other in the darkness. Seconds ticked by, each one adding to my mounting frustration. It had been two days and seven hours since Elfangor told us there were a thousand Controllers already. How much had that number grown since then? How much had it grown while we’d been sitting here dithering?

 _You’re wasting time,_ the little voice said. _This family bullshit isn’t your problem._

Rachel spoke first. “B,” she said, her tone reluctant.

No one but me could see Marco’s raised eyebrow, but the silence implied it well enough, and she continued, looking anywhere but down at Cassie. “I can’t—I mean, I don’t want to—to abandon my family. But we need room to maneuver. We need time to think. And we shouldn’t—we _can’t_ put anyone else in the line of fire. Not unless they know what’s going on, and—and can protect themselves. If we stay, then our parents, my sisters, Tom—if the Yeerks figure us out and come in guns blazing, they’ll—”

She stopped, took a deep breath, composed herself and continued. “We get clear now,” she said, “we can build up an army and when we come back, we’ll have help, we can get _all_ of them out.”

Marco shook his head. “The problem is, these are _all_ terrible choices,” he muttered. “C is just obviously wishful thinking at this point. Like Tobias said, they’re coming, sooner or later. As for A versus B…” He took a deep breath in through his nose and let it out with a sigh. “It’s got to be A. Four families moving out of the county is going to be a _lot_ less suspicious than four kids going missing.”

“Three families,” Jake corrected softly, and Marco winced.

I could feel my shoulders hunching, my wings lifting up behind me in an involuntary response to the tension and stress I was dumping into the owl’s brain. I had thirty-six minutes left in morph, and maybe thirty-six seconds of patience remaining.

“Cassie?” Jake asked, his voice still soft.

Cassie said nothing—only shook her head, almost invisible against the dark blue of the blanket Rachel was wearing. “She’s not voting,” Rachel translated.

Jake raised a hand and ran his fingers through his hair. “So we’ve got a tie, then,” he said wearily.

_Fuck this. They want to get completely paralyzed over, like, seven people while the world ends, that’s their business._

<No, you don’t,> I said aloud, spreading my wings to their full length and testing the cold night air. <I’m changing my vote.>

“To what?”

<To nothing.>

And with that, I leapt out of the tree and winged my way up into the sky.

 

*        *        *

 

I gave the tiny mouse an extra squeeze with my talon, feeling the bones in its hips pop out of joint. Its squeaks were pitifully loud in the owl’s ears, and I felt more than a little guilt as I held it down with one wing and began to demorph. This didn’t, strictly speaking, have anything to do with saving the world…

A minute and a half later, I was standing naked in the parking lot of the rundown thrift shop, shivering in the early morning cold as I acquired the mouse that lay dying in my hand. Trying to look in all directions at once, I strode across the rough asphalt toward the side entrance.

It took another five minutes and a brief stint as a mouse, but soon enough I was inside, thumbing through the racks of clothes in the dark and wishing that I still had owl’s eyes. Foregoing the secondhand underwear, I threw together what felt like a sane outfit, grabbed some shoes and a watch off the shelf, and left through the front door, ignoring the wail of the alarm as I started to jog down the street.

I was _definitely_ going to have to do something about the whole clothes problem.

As I jogged, I focused on Marco, on the DNA I had acquired what felt like weeks ago. As before, there was a feeling of vertigo as my head eased closer to the ground, and a blurring of my vision as my eyes were replaced with Marco’s slightly nearsighted ones. The shrinking was followed by a kind of tugging sensation as my hair shriveled and stiffened, going from near-shoulder-length to only a couple of inches long.

There was also—though I hadn’t mentioned this to Marco—a _very_ uncomfortable sort of tightening sensation in my groin. My parents had decided not to have me circumcised when I was born. Marco’s had apparently had different feelings on the matter.

I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Clearly, the morphing technology took more than just a DNA sample. There had to be some kind of scanning going on during the acquiring process, or else all kinds of things would have been different—I’d read, for instance, that height had almost as much to do with hormones and nutrition as it did with actual genes.

But the owl I’d acquired had only had one eye, and I’d definitely had two when I morphed it. The same went for Marco’s osprey, which had been nursing a broken wing. What was the difference between that and a little scar tissue? It couldn’t be based on expectation—I’d had _zero_ opinions on the issue of Marco’s foreskin until after the morph had finished.

_Just put it on the list._

Along with what a Yeerk pool was, which teachers were Controllers, and how long it would be before the air on Elfangor’s brother’s ship ran out.

The morph complete, I slowed and stopped, putting the size eightish shoes on my now-size-eightish feet. I walked for another ten minutes as my sweat cooled and vanished, until the squat brick structure of the Oak Landing Home for Children came into view.

 _My_ home, for the last five years.

I checked my stolen watch, the screen glowing faintly green in the darkness. It was 4:45, the sky still black, the streets empty. I walked down the sidewalk like I had nothing to hide, turning into the parking lot and striding past the low, barred windows until I reached the one that looked in onto my room. My old room, now.

I didn’t bother trying to peer inside. It was pitch black, after all, and besides, I knew every inch of it. The four double-decker bunks, two to each wall, with trunks between them and a worn, splintering wooden floor covered in a threadbare gray rug. The peeling paint, broken only by the single mirror and the one old poster for the original release of _Star Wars._ The eight sets of thin blankets, the eight flat pillows, and the seven sleeping boys, three of them snoring like chainsaws.

I crouched down, reaching for the strangely-too-close ground, turning to sit with my back against the rough brick, keeping my eyes peeled for any sign of movement in the grounds around me. I’d never really been afraid of the dark before, but I’d also never really believed in monsters before, either.

Things change.

<Garrett,> I called out silently, keeping the beam of my thoughts tightly focused. <Garrett, wake up. Wake up and come to the window.>

Jake, Rachel, Marco—they had families. Marco’s dad, Rachel’s mom. Rachel’s sisters, and Jake’s brother Tom. People they loved for no reason at all except habit. People who loved them back.

<Garrett, wake up. This isn’t a dream. Wake up and come tap on the glass.>

I didn’t have a family. I didn’t even, properly speaking, have friends. It’s hard to make connections when you’re in a different school every year, when the guys in your room are all different ages and they’re in and out of foster care and you only have a month or two to get to know most of them and the ones you know for longer are assholes anyway because the good kids don’t tend to come back.

<Garrett, it’s Tobias. I’m outside—you can hear me, but I can’t hear you. Get up and tap on the window so I know you’re awake.>

What I did have was Garrett. Garrett, and a promise we’d made to each other, almost two years before, cutting our palms with a shard of glass from a broken bottle and clasping hands while the blood dripped down our wrists. We’d both been put on room restriction for that—half the summer had gone by before they let us out for free play again.

<Garrett, wake up, buddy. It’s Tobias. I’m—>

_Tap._

I sucked in a breath. This was it—the point of no return. At this exact moment, there was a grand total total of five people on the entire planet who were in a position to make a stand against the Yeerks. If I said one more word, then one way or another, Garrett was going to be _involved._ Was going to be vulnerable, hunted, a conscript in a very small and ill-prepared army.

 _But he’s vulnerable already. He just doesn’t_ know _it yet._

<Hi, buddy. It’s me. Tobias.>

_Tap._

<I’m—um. I’m outside. I’m speaking to you telepathically. And no, I can’t hear what you’re thinking.>

_Tap tap._

<Yeah, I don’t know what that means. Look, do you think you can get out without waking anybody up? I’ll explain everything once you’re out here.>

_Tap._

<Okay. Good. And—um. You remember our pact, right? That if either one of us ever figured out a way out of—>

_TAP._

<Careful, quiet! Okay. Right. Listen, you should—you should grab your bag. And anything else you want to keep, because—>

_Tap. Tap tap tap tap tap._

<Yeah. I don’t think we’re going to be coming back.>

 

*        *        *

 

I stared down at the tiny, crumpled note, easily readable in the predawn light. A mess of conflicting emotions swarmed into my brain—suspicion, anger, embarrassment, astonishment, frustration, shame. “Jake,” I called out, loud enough to be heard from any of the nearby cavernous structures. “You just stay put until I’m done here.”

“Who’s Jake?” Garrett asked.

We were standing in the middle of the construction site, not far from the spot where Elfangor’s ship had landed. Beside us was a low, half-finished foundation, filled with hard-packed earth. I had pulled aside a dozen or so of the loose cinderblocks, revealing the dark hole in which Jake had stashed the _Iscafil_ device.

“You’ll find out in a minute,” I said darkly, letting the scrap of paper fall to the ground as I hefted the alien cube. “This first.”

Garrett eyed the blue box warily, very obviously standing just out of arm’s reach. “You lied,” he said, a tremor in his voice.

“What?”

“You said you’d explain everything once I came outside.”

“I did. I mean, okay, I haven’t told you the second half yet, but I explained _this_ part.”

“No, you didn’t. You said ‘Andalite’ and ‘morphing power’ like those were answers. What’s going to _happen_ to me if I touch that thing?”

“It’s not going to hurt you.”

“How do you _know?”_

“It didn’t hurt _me._ ”

“Neither do shrimp, but if _I_ eat one, I die.”

I gritted my teeth, suppressing the urge to snap. For one, that sort of thing never worked with Garrett, and for another, he had a point. I’d seen the morphing cube work on exactly five people. That could mean it was completely safe, or it could mean it killed half the people who used it, and we’d just gotten lucky. Elfangor hadn’t mentioned it being dangerous, but something told me the Andalites hadn’t done a whole lot of beta testing on humans.

I dropped down onto one knee, putting my head just below Garrett’s chin. “You’re right,” I said quietly, forcing calm into my voice. “I don’t really know what’ll happen to you. I don’t really know what happened to _me._ It’s alien technology, and I probably wouldn’t understand it even if Elfangor had explained it for hours. But it didn’t hurt me, and it didn’t hurt the other people I was with, and you _saw_ that it works. Think about it, buddy. Any animal in the world. Any person in the world. You’ll be able to go anywhere, do anything. You won’t ever have to go back to Oak Landing again.”

“Any animal I can touch. For two hours at a time. Two minutes to change. Back to me in between.”

I nodded. “Yep. Those are the rules.”

<Actually, there’s one more rule.>

I stiffened and stood, turning to scan the skeletal buildings around me. “Jake,” I warned. “Let me handle this.”

<Sorry,> Jake replied, and something in his tone told me that he had switched to private thought-speak. <Your family is your business, but the cube belongs to _all_ of us. I’m coming out. I’m in Andalite morph—warn the kid. >

“Who’s Jake?” Garrett asked again.

“A friend,” I said reluctantly. I looked down at the note lying in the dirt, written in Jake’s neat, careful handwriting.

 

_TOBIAS—_

_Figured you’d come back for the cube. Notice how I DIDN’T take it away and hide it. That’s a peace offering. I’m alone…can we talk?            —Jake_

 

“Brace yourself,” I muttered. “You’re about to find out what an Andalite looks like.”

There was a soft crumbling sound from one of the concrete structures, the crunch of hooves on gravel. A shadow took shape in one of the open doorways, and I heard Garrett gasp as it stepped out into the gray morning light.

I hadn’t really registered it the first time, on board Elfangor’s ship. And there had been too many things on my mind the second time, in Cassie’s barn. But now, watching the lithe blue shape emerge from the darkness of the half-finished building, I couldn’t deny it.

Andalites were _terrifying._

It was like a centaur, if centaurs had been half-scorpion instead of half-horse. The body, low and wide, rippling with muscles under the short fur. The legs, short and side-cocked, their every motion unnervingly fast, like a movie with dropped frames. The torso, held parallel with the ground, the arms waving like feelers over the dirt, ready to act as a third pair of legs if necessary. The eyes, one pair pointing forward and down, the other mounted on stalks, swiveling constantly.

And of course, the tail.

It had to be almost ten feet long, a smooth, tapering whip of pure muscle, capped by a reaper’s scythe of dense bone. It hovered and dipped and darted in a strangely hypnotic dance, as if following the flight of a drunken mosquito. Beside me, Garrett squeaked and then disappeared over the wall of another low foundation, peering out over the cinderblocks with only his eyes and forehead visible.

“Jake, meet Garrett,” I grumbled. “Garrett, this is Jake. He usually doesn’t look like this.”

<Hi, Garrett,> Jake said, coming to a stop and rearing so that his torso stood more or less upright.

“You’re a human?” Garrett asked, his voice shaky. “You’re morphed?”

<Yeah. This is Elfangor’s body. He let us acquire him before he died.>

“Turn back into a person, please.”

Jake gave no response, but the fur covering his body immediately began to shrink, the hairs thinning away to reveal pinkening skin beneath. Garrett watched with wide eyes as Jake’s tail and back legs disappeared, as the smooth curve at the end of his torso reformed into head and neck and shoulders. A minute and a half passed, and the Andalite was gone, leaving a thirteen-year-old human boy standing in its place.

I noticed with begrudging respect that Jake made no attempt to cover up, showed no sign of shivering as he stood naked and barefoot in front of us, his hands clasped behind his back. His expression was calm and composed, his eyes sharp and commanding. It was the same look he’d given the three bullies who had me cornered, on the day we’d first met—a look that said you had two options, and only one of them was going to work.

He turned to me. “We ended up compromising,” he said. “Marco’s getting his dad out. Rachel and I are going to stay on alert for a couple of days. If they come for us, or for any of our family members, we bail. If they don’t, we start working on plans to extract everybody. Cassie’s on her way up into the mountains already with some spare camping gear Marco had lying around.”

“None of that is my problem,” I said bluntly.

Jake nodded. “I know. I get it. I got it back in the woods, when you stopped saying ‘we’ and started saying ‘you.’” He turned to look at Garrett, who was still standing behind the low cinderblock wall. “Did Tobias tell you about the Yeerks yet?” he asked.

“After,” I said, before Garrett could answer. “Two separate choices. He gets the morphing power either way.”

Jake shook his head. “No. I mean, okay, yes, fine, you get to make your own call on that, I’m not the boss of you and we _both_ know how to blow up the cube, so there’s no point in giving you orders you’re just going to ignore. But if he’s not in, then he has to be out—all the way out, like out of the state, where he’s not going to leave us vulnerable.” He fixed me with a steady gaze. “Same goes for you.”

“You don’t get to make up rules,” I snapped.

“That’s not a rule, it’s common sense,” he answered mildly. “And don’t act like it isn’t just because you’re pissed off. We’re still on the same side, here.” His gaze flickered over to Garrett before returning to me. “It _also_ seems like common sense to say that recruiting ten-year-olds is a bad idea, and to point out that this little kid could be a Controller, and to find out just what the hell you think you’re doing right now, but the sun’s about to come up and I haven’t slept all night and I’m just going to go ahead and ask you to look me in the eye and tell me why this isn’t insane.”

“I turn twelve in three months and eight days,” Garrett remarked.

“My bad,” Jake said, his eyes still on me. We stared at one another for a long, tense moment.

 _You_ are _still on the same side,_ the little voice in the back of my head whispered. _And he didn’t take the cube away. That should count for something._

“I’m going after Elfangor’s brother,” I said finally.

Jake’s eyes widened in surprise, and I continued. “He’s been out there for almost three days. He could be dying, and the rest of you are just— _sitting around_. I’m going to find him, and I’m going to rescue him if I can. He might have intel. Weapons. Alien morphs, maybe. Stuff we can use. And even if he doesn’t—we’re the only ones who can save him.”

The surprise had faded, and Jake’s expression was now carefully, deliberately neutral. “Marco still thinks there might be actual Andalite bandits out there,” he said.

I shrugged. “So maybe I get there and he’s already gone. It’s not like I’ve got anything _better_ to do.”

“And Garrett?”

“I trust him,” I said simply. Jake could draw whatever conclusions he wanted out of _that_ statement.

“He’s eleven.”

“I trust him,” I repeated. “And I need somebody to watch my back.”

Jake turned to look at Garrett, who had climbed up onto the wall and was now sitting there, watching us wordlessly. “A thousand Controllers,” he said softly.

“You see any Bug fighters?” I countered. “Besides, the odds are only going to get worse. Now’s the time to take that risk.”

Jake shook his head. “Too much risk. There has to be a way to be _sure._ If you wait three days, maybe.”

“Look, if we don’t get _moving_ , the Yeerks are going to win by default.”

He looked me straight in the eye. “So it’s ‘we’ again?”

I didn’t answer. Just looked down at the cube in my hands, remembered watching each of the others shiver as the morphing technology took hold.

“Yeerks are—aliens?” Garrett broke in hesitantly. “Bad ones?”

Jake gave me a look that said _you want to tell him, or should I?_

“They’re bodysnatchers,” I explained. “Little slugs that crawl into your ear and take over your brain. Once they’re inside you, they know everything you know, and they run your body like it’s a remote control car.”

Garrett’s eyes widened slightly.

“They’ve taken maybe a thousand people already,” Jake said. “Cops, firefighters, EMTs. Some of the teachers at our school. The mom and dad of a friend of mine. They’re trying to take over the whole planet. They want to turn each and every one of us into a slave.”

“Why?” Garrett asked.

Jake and I exchanged glances again.

“To use us as weapons to take over the rest of the galaxy,” Jake answered.

“ _Why_ , though? What’s the point? Like, what do they want in the _end?”_

I blinked. None of us had really stopped to ask that question yet. “Um. I guess because—I mean, they’re just slugs, right? They can’t see or hear or—or do _anything_ , really. Not unless they have a host body to control.”

Jake gave a low, quiet whistle, and I couldn’t help wincing a little myself. When you put it _that_ way, suddenly the whole thing felt a lot less black and white...

_Except that every “free” Yeerk means another trapped human. No middle ground. It’s literally us or them._

Garrett’s head was tilted to one side, his expression thoughtful. “Once they’re in, can you get them back out again?”

“We think so,” Jake said. “Haven’t actually tried, though.”

“Can they take over animals?”

“We don’t know.”

I glanced at the horizon, growing brighter as the sun began to rise behind the clouds. “We need to get out of here soon,” I interrupted, holding up the cube. “Jake?”

He raised his eyebrows. “If I tell you not to do this, will you listen?”

“No.”

“Then why are you asking?”

“Because you might say yes.”

Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Elfangor gave us morphing so we could fight the Yeerks. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it’s for _._ You already put the whole human race on the line just by _talking_ to this kid. If you use the cube on him, and the Yeerks take him—”

He broke off, shaking his head. “There’s not a lot of ways this can play out, Tobias. You just spent a bunch of points you don’t really have. Ask me what Marco would say we need to do about you.”

I’ll admit it—that one gave me a little chill. “We’re still on the same side.”

“Are we?”

“I’m trying to get something _done_ here.”

“By cutting us down from five to four, and bringing in a stranger without any input from the rest of us.”

“We’re _all_ strangers, Jake. Rachel, Marco, Cassie—I don’t _know_ those people. I barely even know _you._ You’re a nice guy, and all, but—I don’t trust you with my life. I can’t. You’re not— _hard_ enough. You guys keep acting like we’ve got time to waste, like there’s somebody going to show up and save us.”

“Elfangor showed up.”

“Exactly! That was our miracle! We’re not going to get _another_ one.”

Jake sighed. “Yesterday—” He broke off, looking at the sky, and started again. “Two days ago, you chose me as your leader.”

“That was before you fucking fell apart when Cassie went missing.”

He stiffened, his eyes glittering, and I felt my shoulders tense. For a long moment, neither of us said anything.

“Fair,” he growled. “I’m not as _jaded and cold_ as Tobias the street-smart tough guy. I lost it, a little. Lesson learned. But you don’t see _Tom_ anywhere around here, do you?”

I shrugged. “I need somebody to watch my back,” I repeated.

“Somebody who’s not one of us. Somebody you _trust_.”

I didn’t respond.

“Cuts both ways, doesn’t it?” he asked.

I still didn’t answer. Just watched as he gnawed at his lip, looked at me, looked at Garrett, looked around at the empty, skeletal ruins of the construction site. As he shifted back and forth, and shivered.

Once.

“Garrett,” he said abruptly. “You take orders from Tobias?”

“No.” Garrett’s eyes were wide, and they didn’t quite meet ours, shifting back and forth between my forehead and Jake’s. “But I listen to him.”

Jake turned his gaze back to me. “Tell him.”

I grimaced. “Garrett,” I said tightly. “If you take the morphing power, you either have to come with me, or you have to go away. Far away, like England or Canada, and never come back. Because if you come back, they might catch you, and if they catch you they’ll catch us all.”

“That’s a rule?”

“That’s a rule.”

“Not quite,” Jake cut in. “There’s a third option. You can come back and stay with _us._ With me and the rest of my group. But if you do that, you have to follow _our_ rules.”

Garrett nodded silently.

“As for _you,_ Tobias,” Jake said, crossing his arms. “I’m sending you on a mission. Go find Elfangor’s brother. Bring him back if you can, or at least find out what happened to him. And if you need somebody to watch your back, you can use the morphing cube— _once._ ” He looked Garrett up and down, his gaze measured and calculating. “But it has to be somebody who’s worth the risk. Not just somebody you like or care about. Somebody we can _trust_.”

I bit back a bitter laugh. “That’s how we’re going to play this, then?”

Jake didn’t flinch. “That’s how _I’m_ going to play this,” he said. “ _You_ can do whatever you want. But I don’t exactly see how us being enemies helps anybody but the Yeerks. Maybe next time you’ll think about that before writing the rest of us off.”

And with that, he turned and strode away, feathers sprouting from his skin as he disappeared among the dark, looming structures.

 

*        *        *

 

<Something’s wrong,> Garrett said.

<You’re just not used to it yet,> I answered. <Try to relax, let the bird do the flying.>

We were both in hawk morph, floating above one of the parks on the edge of the city. Our clothes—and Garrett’s bag—were stashed high in the gnarled oak tree where we had morphed, hidden from the ground by the thick, leafy branches.

I had gone first so that Garrett could acquire from me, then demorphed again to hold him steady in the tree as he attempted his first transformation. It had gone without a hitch, and he’d immediately taken to the air, his delighted laughter filling my head.

Now, though, I could see him struggling, the rhythm of his wingbeats erratic as he fought to maintain altitude.

<Relax!> I called out again. <Don’t try to take control yourself!>

<I’m not!> he answered, panic creeping into his words as they played through my thoughts. <Total autopilot, I swear!>

He began to twitch as I closed the gap between us, his muscles spasming as if he were having a seizure. <Never mind,> I shouted, <take control! Take control!>

<It’s not working!>

Suddenly, his wings folded and he tumbled, plummeting toward the ground three hundred feet below. <AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!>

<Hang on!>

I tucked my own wings and dove, raking my talons forward. We collided a second or two later, my claws digging into his flesh, his actual scream cutting through the air as his mental one filled my head.

I flapped furiously, struggling to slow our descent, his own out-of-control wings buffeting me as we curved toward the ground. <Hang on!> I shouted again. <This is going to—>

_CRUNCH._

I let go just as we slammed into the earth, both of us rolling, a mass of dust and feathers. I’d only managed to slow us to maybe twenty miles per hour, and even the lightweight hawk body was stunned by the impact. A sharp pain shot up my right wing, and I let out an involuntary cry as I struggled back to my feet.

<Garrett!> I called out. <You okay?>

<No flying,> he moaned, his body still twitching in the dirt, tiny droplets of blood leaking through his feathers where I’d grabbed him. <No flying, no flying, no flying.>

<Are you okay?> I asked again. I scanned the park around us. It was still early, maybe a quarter to seven, and as far as I could tell, no one had witnessed our wild tumble. There were a few bushes about fifty feet away where we would be able to demorph and remorph, restoring our hawk bodies to full health.

Except that whatever was wrong with Garrett’s would _still_ be wrong, since the morphed body was identical every time.

<No. Flying.>

I shuffled closer, holding my one unbroken wing out for balance. <Did you break anyth—>

I stopped mid-thought, looking down at his crumpled body in shock.

_No way._

Slowly, carefully, I extended my healthy wing again, watching as the muscles in Garrett’s own wing twitched in response. I flapped once.

_Twitch._

Twice.

_Twitch, twitch._

I hopped backwards, fluttering, watching as a series of tiny spasms rippled across his body. The second I stopped moving, they ceased.

_Holy shit._

<Garrett,> I said. <Can you fly?>

< _NO FLYING._ >

<You’ve either got to fly or you’ve got to climb the tree naked,> I said.

<Naked. No more flying. Never again.>

<Fine, no flying. Can you stand?>

I held still as he rolled over, coming to his feet. <Yes,> he answered.

<The bushes, over there. You can demorph and make a run for it.>

<What about you?>

<I’ll wait here until you’re demorphed. I think I’m—I think there’s some kind of interference between us, from both using the same body at the same time. Every time I move, you twitch.> I extended my wing and flapped it once to demonstrate.

<Don’t,> Garrett said flatly. <Bushes. Morph. Tree. Got it.>

I waited until Garrett streaked past me before heading toward the bushes myself. It was a slow, agonizing process, my dead wing dragging behind me, sending shooting pains up through my shoulder. By the time I reached cover and demorphed, Garrett had reappeared, carrying his bag and my stolen clothes.

We left the park on foot, Garrett still visibly shaken. “Didn’t you guys _test_ that?” he asked, as we passed through the gate and headed down the street.

“Just for a minute,” I admitted, embarrassed. “We checked to see if Marco could morph Dude. But he demorphed as soon as we saw that it worked, so we didn’t have time to notice.”

“Never flying. Never ever flying again.”

“Oh, come on,” I chided. “It worked fine until I got up there, too.”

Though that _did_ throw a wrench into the works. I had borrowed a fast-flying morph from Cassie, one that could theoretically make it out to Elfangor’s brother in just two or three days. But it had come from the Gardens, and if Garrett and I couldn’t share it, we were going to need a new plan.

“Where are we going?” Garrett asked, as we turned a corner and entered one of the nicer suburban neighborhoods.

“Marco’s house,” I said. “We need to warn the others about the resonance. And he’s the closest to the beach.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because Elfangor’s brother is somewhere in between Hawaii and Russia.”

“We’re leaving _now?”_

“He’s been out there for three days already. We don’t have any time to waste. And if anybody _does_ decide to notice that we’re gone, it’d be better not to be here.”

“How are we going to get to him?”

“Don’t know yet. Let me know if you come up with any ideas.”

Another quick morph, a brief thought-speak conversation, and we were on our way once more. Traffic was picking up as the Monday rush hour began, and the driveways and street corners began to fill up with kids waiting for their school buses. We moved off of the main roads and began cutting through parks and backyards, avoiding the places where truant officers were likely to look. It was quiet and calm, the morning sun breaking through the clouds and warming our backs as we went.

“We’re going to have to stash my bag somewhere,” Garrett said, after a long silence.

“We’ll find a place,” I assured him. We climbed over a fence and crossed the railroad tracks, the smell of salt strengthening as we got closer to the ocean.

“Tobias?” Garrett asked quietly, his voice barely audible over the crunch of our footsteps.

“Yeah?”

“Why me?”

“What?”

“I mean—why not Louis, or Fletcher, or Johnny. They’re—you know. Older. Smarter. Braver.”

The last word was almost a whisper, as if Garrett wasn’t quite sure he wanted me to hear it. I was silent for a while, considering my answer as we cut through a small patch of woods. “We made a promise,” I said finally, looking over at the younger boy.

Garrett didn’t look up. His brow was furrowed as he stared down at the ground, placing each step with careful precision. Another minute went by before he spoke again.

“I didn’t think you were coming back,” he said. “When you didn’t come home Friday, and then you didn’t come home Saturday either. Xander took your bunk last night. We all thought you’d just—gotten out.”

“We made a promise,” I repeated.

“I’m just saying. If you’d broken it. If you hadn’t come back. You could’ve—I wouldn’t’ve blamed you.”

I stopped. After a few more steps, Garrett did, too.

I felt a kind of cold anger coming over me, the product of almost eight years of orphanages and foster homes and shitty roommates and grownups who weren’t doing their jobs. Of swirlies and meatloaf and secondhand shoes, flat pillows and no money and no one, no one, _no one_ you could really count on, all of it flashed into my head, crystallizing into a single, sharp icicle of bitter resentment. “Fuck that,” I said, reaching out and grabbing Garrett by the shoulder, spinning him around to face me. He twitched uncomfortably out of my grasp, but I stayed close, almost nose to nose, looking straight into his eyes as they stared resolutely at my chin.

“You damn well _better_ blame me, if I ever pull some bullshit like that,” I hissed. “You’d better be fucking _furious._ Don’t you _ever_ try to play like it’s okay for people to just blow you off, like—like you’re _nothing_ , like you don’t _count._ ”

“Everybody bails eventually,” he said softly.

“ _No,_ ” I shot back. I held up my hand, the scar from our pact almost invisible among the lines of my palm. “ _Most_ people bail. Most people don’t know what the fuck a promise _is._ But that’s _their_ problem, not yours.”

I turned and started walking again, holding my breath until I heard the rustle of Garrett’s footsteps behind me. We went on in silence for another handful of minutes, as the ground flattened out and the gentle crash of waves became audible over the breeze.

“I’m scared,” he said finally.

“Me, too,” I replied, looking back over my shoulder. “You don’t have to come, you know.”

“I thought you needed somebody to watch your back.”

“I do. And—look, I _want_ your help, okay? You’re not—you know how to take care of yourself, and you’re somebody I can trust. Nobody else I know is on both lists. But I didn’t get you out just so I could boss you around. You want out, just go. Jake’s a decent guy, he’ll look out for you. Or go to Canada. You can morph, so you’ll be able to get food and stuff. You’ll be safe there as long as anybody.”

Garrett was quiet for another long minute. “It’s really happening?” he asked. “The invasion.”

“Yeah. You heard about vice-principal Chapman?”

Garrett nodded.

“They killed him. His wife and daughter, too.”

“How are you going to stop them?”

I shrugged. “No idea,” I said. “But saving Elfangor’s brother seems like a good first step.”

We stashed his bag under the roots of a half-toppled oak tree and emerged out into the headlands, scrambling our way down the steep slope until we came to the beach. “What now?” Garrett asked.

“Now we try to think of a plan,” I said. “We look for animals we might be able to use, or walk down to the shipyard and find a boat that’s heading the right dir—”

I broke off abruptly as we rounded the cape, my jaw dropping in shock. For a full ten seconds, my brain simply refused to work, unwilling to believe the signals my eyes were sending it.

“Oh,” said Garrett as he stopped beside me, his voice shaky. “Wow. Hey, Tobias—I think I just came up with an idea.”

The beach in front of us was packed, over a hundred people milling around, the air filled with the buzz of quiet conversation. Most of them were carrying buckets, the rest snapping pictures with their phones, or just standing there watching. They were gathered around an enormous, towering creature, a wall of gray flesh longer than a train car and almost as tall.

 _Sperm whale,_ said Cassie’s voice, echoing out of a memory of her barn, two days and two lifetimes ago. _Sperm whale and giant squid. Those are the only big animals we know of that go that deep, and they don’t have either one of them at the Gardens. They don’t have either one_ anywhere, _as far as I know._

“This is impossible,” I whispered, still trying to convince my sluggish brain to work. It was too convenient, too _perfect_ to be a coincidence. I could see the whale’s labored breathing, see the pooling of its flesh as it collapsed beneath its own weight. In a few hours, it would be dead. It had beached itself at _exactly_ the right time for me and Garrett to come across it.

“Oh,” Garrett said. “Is it a trap, then?”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to think. That would mean that the Yeerks knew we were human, that they knew about Elfangor’s brother, that they could pluck a whale right out of the ocean and that they somehow knew _in advance_ when Garrett and I would be arriving on the beach—

No. If they had _that_ much power, the war would already be over.

But as I stared at the dying animal, I couldn’t help remembering another conversation, this one much more recent than Cassie’s lecture on marine biology.

 _Elfangor showed up,_ Jake had said.

 _Exactly!_ I’d answered him. _That was our miracle! We’re not going to get_ another _one._

“Tobias?” Garrett asked. “What should we do?”

I looked at him. Looked at the whale. Looked out at the endless horizon.

Three thousand miles of water, and somewhere in the middle of it, Elfangor’s brother. Calling out for help.

_Just put it on the list._

“We acquire it,” I said. “And then we watch each other’s back.”


	6. Esplin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A glimpse inside the Yeerk command structure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was co-authored with Ketura/Teltura (reddit/ff.net).

**Chapter 06: Esplin 9466**

Breached the theoretical mass synchronization collapse limit? Eliminated the unitary host-construct dependency? _Tripled_ the efficiency of the controller-construct Z-space replacement algorithm?

_Impossible._

Esplin nine-four-double-six stared at the report, feeling the odd mixture of fear and happiness that was always his host body’s response to bad news. Fear, because they had been one for so long that it felt his own emotions on the deepest possible level. Happiness, because no matter how completely he ruled, Alloran still lived beneath the surface.

Not that he truly wished to be rid of Alloran. Not anymore. It would be so _lonely_ , after all, with only one mind in his head. So boring, with no audience. So easy, with no critic.

There were times, though, when the Andalite warrior’s joy was a burden that Esplin tired of bearing.

Esplin scanned the report again, taking separate note of each development.

One—the Andalites had successfully replaced a human girl, with mimicry on par with that of a Yeerk. Conclusion: someone else in the Andalite chain of command had discovered Alloran’s little back door.

Two (related)—at least one of them had been on Earth for multiple cycles, long enough to gather sufficient intelligence to choose _precisely_ the right human for easy access to genetic material, likely since the arrival of the Yeerk’s own invading force. Conclusion: _stowaways._

(Corollary: _another_ upgrade to the morphing technology? The disguised Andalite agent had been executing the acquisition process _in morph_ prior to being uncovered. Alternate hypothesis: handheld extractor/scanner, for later integration.)

Three—it had morphed _directly_ from construct to construct, in roughly one third of the standard interval, after remaining in disguise for an unknown period of time (but at least eight times the original theoretical maximum). Conclusion: __________?

Beneath the surface, Alloran supplied a string of appropriate Andalite expletives, each tinged with an acid mix of mockery and smug triumph. Esplin responded with a searing lash of pain, and Alloran laughed even as he shrank back into silence.

This was _frightening._ If the Andalites had indeed managed to overcome three (possibly four!) of the morphing technology’s largest weaknesses, then the Leeran morph (with all of its disadvantages) was now the _only_ method of determining which of his subordinates could be trusted. And if his corollary was correct, and they had somehow infiltrated his ship, then they could be literally _anywhere_ , lying in wait for just the right opportunity—to press just the right buttons, to launch just the right people out of an airlock at 0.5 _c_ …

(It would explain nearly every obstacle they had encountered so far—every setback, every delay, every frustrating malfunction, so much incompetence and always _just_ short of something truly unforgiveable.)

Even the coercive demorphing field, so close to functional, might no longer hold any promise. Changes _that_ significant suggested a fundamentally new approach to the entire morphing process, one that could easily rely on a completely different source of power.

With a quick tap of his controls, Esplin initiated the standard lockdown protocol, sealing his quarters and beginning the combination scan and decontamination. Ordinarily, the lockdown took place at random intervals, with a maximum of half a morphing period between cleans, but even that might no longer be sufficient. Esplin had long ago depilated his host’s body, to hinder infestation by tiny morphed parasites, but if the Andalites had gone _this_ far, who was to say they wouldn’t try infiltrating as _bacteria_ , to slip through the holes in the decon net?

(On a parallel line of thought, his constant monitoring of Alloran picked up a thread of curiosity, noting with bemusement that his pet warrior was even now unable to ignore the temptation of an interesting problem. Possible applications of the new morphing technology streamed through the link between them, and Esplin filed them away, to be guarded against later. Likely most of the precautions would be unnecessary and redundant—he had yet to meet another Andalite who was a match for Alloran in pure savagery and clarity of thought, who had the same inexorable drive—)

((Alloran scoffed at the backhanded compliment, but could not _quite_ suppress the minute wash of pride—))

(((Oh yes, they were _made_ for one another, if only the warrior could see past the narrow interests of his native species, and take the larger view—)))

Suddenly Esplin’s musings flashed to a halt, all of his speculations ceasing, all layers collapsing into one as he directed every level of attention toward the path of Alloran’s thoughts. The process was immediate, automatic, a reflexive response to a trigger Esplin had installed long, long ago, when he had only just begun to learn what it was to govern a mind that was greater than your own:

Alloran was _confused_ , which meant that it was time for Esplin to pay attention.

The warrior’s mind instantly went blank, his thoughts smoothing into the placid flow of meditation as he tried to cover his involuntary betrayal. Esplin merely laughed, seizing the reins and _forcing_ the neurons to fire, unwinding the spool of thought to see what tiny flaw had caught his host’s attention.

— _and even then, why leave Ispec alive AFTERWARD, a critically-positioned host, it made NO SENSE—_

—farther back—

— _surely not so utterly shortsighted as to throw away an invaluable tactical advantage on a SCARE TACTIC—_

—farther back—

— _unless for some reason he WANTED the Yeerks to receive Ispec’s report? But what possible justification—_

—farther—

— _the first, most basic, most OBVIOUS move being to grind the filthy slug into the dust, even a stiff-tailed cadet could not HELP but notice the open communication channel—_

Ah.

Carefully, suppressing his desire to leap to a conclusion, Esplin reconstructed the scene in his mind’s eye. The mighty Andalite, exposed but triumphant. The lowly Yeerk, cowering in a weak and feeble body. The gloating reveal— _you have no idea of the depth of your failure! We took the girl weeks ago, and you clumsy, stupid Yeerks noticed nothing! Yet another victory for the superior Andalite race!_

(It would have gone _something_ like that, anyway.)

Yes, it was in _character,_ all right, character so perfect it was almost a mockery. But the flaws were obvious when you looked at it objectively. If they’d had the girl for weeks, then why the sudden rush to visit half of the animals in the collection?

Obviously, it was a bluff. Some thick-stalked ship-jockey, who had never so much as _heard_ the word “espionage,” found himself stranded after the battle, moved immediately to acquire local morphs—

— _at least the idiot had followed ONE protocol correctly—_

—and blundered right into the middle of the Yeerks’ damage control operation (triggered by some _other_ cloud-furred fool?). Desperate, he changed forms, got his leg shot off, and then, unmasked and stranded deep in enemy territory, tried to cover up his blunder with boasting. It made sense.

_Except—_

(Alloran desperately tried not to object, but he had no _choice_ , really…)

— _at that point, WHY didn’t the oaf terminate the enemy host?_

It went against every scrap of Andalite military doctrine, half of which Alloran himself had written, replacing centuries of obsolete folly. It was the first lecture given to every cadet who entered the armed forces: You identify the enemy. You find the enemy. You destroy the enemy. End process. You don’t _make the enemy squirm by parading tactical information in front of them!_

For a moment, Esplin enjoyed the feeling of camaraderie as he and his host were united by their shared frustration at the eternal incompetence of underlings. Then the moment passed, Alloran recoiled, and they each turned their mind back to the problem, the master eagerly, the pet involuntarily.

Who were the key players? Subject A, a midgrade Yeerk operative, being outwitted by subject B, a stunning example of Andalite mediocrity. In the background: the incoming reinforcements? A frustrated field commander?

_The host._

Laughable. Of course Alloran _would_ think that—he had to, lest he cease to be able to deny his own irrelevance. Though the human _had_ in fact apparently fought her Yeerk to a standstill, so credit where credit was due. Such a wasted effort, only to have her words fall on uncaring Andalite ears. They’d taken her mate within minutes while the oaf blundered off in the opposite direction—

_The host’s daughter._

Dead. Obviously. Even dust-fed buffoons would not risk the sudden arrival of a doppelganger—

_Unless she was cooperating._

Esplin froze, cursing himself. Of _course_ —that would not only justify the ill-advised and irrational mercy, it would also explain the swiftness with which the Andalites had learned of the animal collection, and infiltrated its security.

The castigation turned to laughter as Alloran’s sense grew thick with horror. Oh, the proud Andalite race, reduced to alliance with planetbound primates! Would they invite the monkeys into space, next? Give them weapons, perhaps? Maybe some of the lonelier sort would morph and seek _mates_ among the humans, as rumor said had been done during the conquest of the Hork-Bajir, on the homeworld of the Arn—perhaps Esplin and Alloran would give it a try, together?

Alloran snarled, a wordless expression of pure fury, and Esplin reveled in the wash of hormones that filled the skull where the pair of them lived. Meanwhile, in the back of their shared mind, a lower, slower sort of process began following up on the new hypothesis, working through the strategic implications of a human-Andalite alliance, combining it with all of the other data on the current situation—

((( _Cassie Withers, my host’s daughter! She just morphed into an elephant!_ )))

((( _We took her daughter weeks ago, and she never even noticed._ )))

(( _Cassie Withers, my host’s daughter! She just morphed into an elephant!_ ))

(( _And after holding human form for an entire day! Visser Three will be exceptionally interested in hearing how you accomplished_ _that._ ))

( _Cassie Withers, my host’s daughter! She just morphed into an elephant!_ )

( _Enjoy it while you can, Yeerk. The Andalites are coming_.)

_Cassie Withers, my host’s daughter! She just morphed into an elephant!_

Like a rocket launching skyward, the realization tore through every layer of Esplin’s attention, each fraction of his mind demanding greater priority for the thought until even Alloran’s misery failed to be more interesting.

_Unless she was cooperating._

A human that could morph—

A human that didn’t have to bypass the mass synchronization limit because it wasn’t morphed in the first place—

A human that could transform straight into a construct because _it wasn’t morphed in the first place_ —

A human that could acquire animals directly, without demorphing to Andalite form, because _IT WASN’T MORPHED IN THE FIRST PLACE—_

A human that didn’t stomp its captive into the dust because it hadn’t _read_ the Andalite war journal, and because the captive hadn’t been another faceless Yeerk but the _human’s own mother_ —

It all clicked into place, a hypothesis far more elegant than any of the others—a single, deft principle that explained _every one_ of the oddities that had troubled them both so far, dispensing with the need for impossible leaps in technology and implausibly incompetent operatives—

((Well, not the oddities aboard ship, but there was no _fundamental_ reason to expect those to be related.))

(Esplin ignored the rising echoes of Alloran’s seething self-hatred as the warrior realized he had once again guided his master to the solution.)

It had Elfangor’s scent all over it—a final, desperate ploy, recruiting a handful of primitives and arming them with the most devastatingly powerful technology in the known universe—

(And _that_ was why he had allowed himself to be dispatched so easily, rather than morphing and leading them on a merry chase. Esplin and Alloran _had_ been somewhat disappointed.)

A quick explanation (inadequate)—a quick activation (untested! Irresponsible!)—a noble sacrifice (all poor Elfangor ever wanted)—and behold, a brand-new piece made its entry into the game. Morph-capable humans! _Children,_ some of them! How many would the Beast have had time to recruit? Seven? Fourteen?

For the third time in as many minutes, Esplin’s thoughts ground to a halt, his mind stunned by the sudden recognition of a new expanse of possibility.

_Had Elfangor left the Iscafil device in their hands?_

(Beneath the surface, Alloran howled with despair at the folly, _the absolute folly_ , for they both knew that that was _exactly_ what the Beast would have done.)

And now Esplin felt that odd mixture of fear and happiness again, its sources reversed, its flavor subtly but deliciously different. Here was a challenge worthy of his _full_ attention, with the potential to strike _years_ off the time that his true plan required. They were down there, somewhere—frightened humans with the key in their hands, a key which they would surely destroy rather than allow him to have, a key which not even his fellow Yeerks could be permitted to discover.

Esplin opened a channel to the central command hub. A bladed Hork-Bajir answered immediately, its salute crisp and respectful, its eyes dull and uncomprehending.

 _Message,_ Visser Three signed, and the Hork-Bajir signaled confirmation.

_The Andalite bandits are cooperating with the humans. Investigate all known associates of Hedrick Chapman, Paula Chapman, Melissa Chapman, Walter Withers, Michelle Withers, and Cassie Withers, and place a full surveillance net on Walter and Michelle Withers. Do not engage; observe and report only._

The Hork-Bajir signaled confirmation again, and Visser Three closed the channel, turning to the small compartment that stood beside his interface.

A little snack, before the real work began…


	7. Jake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake plays to his strengths, guiding the group toward their first real mission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes a continuity error is a continuity error, and sometimes it's plot.

**Chapter 07: Jake**

_—I watched, helpless, as Tom smiled, his eyes like chips of ice. He lifted the knife and drew it across his own throat, and I screamed as blood spurted out, as the laughter of the Yeerk inside his head became a hideous gurgle—_

_—I watched, helpless, as my mother’s foot pressed down on the accelerator, as the car surged forward, faster and faster, as she looked into my eyes and yanked the wheel. The car shrieked, twisted, tumbled over and over again, and my mother’s body flew out of the windshield and dragged along the highway, still laughing—_

_—I watched, helpless, as my father opened the door to the hospital roof, as he pocketed the keys and strode across the gravel, whistling a happy tune. He stepped up onto the low wall around the edge and paused, grinning, his eyes finding mine as he took the final step out into the open air—_

_—I watched, helpless, as Rachel—_

_—as Marco—_

_—as Cassie—_

I awoke to the vibration of my phone, buried inside my pillowcase, followed a second later by the soft chime of bells in the one earbud that hadn’t fallen out. My sheets were twisted and knotted around my body, musty and wet with the sweat that was still pouring out of me. Holding back a groan, I rolled over and looked at the clock.

3:45AM.

I could feel adrenaline tracing lines through my body, feel the pounding of my heart in my temples, my jaw, my fists. The nightmares were no surprise—I’d woken up to them twice tonight already. If anything, I was grateful that I’d slept long enough to have them. It was the fourth night since the construction site, and I had yet to stay asleep for more than two hours in a row.

Reaching out, I reset both alarms—the phone to 5:45, the clock to 5:50—then woke up my computer, squinting against the sudden, searing light. I switched the final backup alarm from 3:51 to 5:51 and killed the monitor, trying to recover my night vision so that I could make my way through the maze of hazards on my floor in silence.

The world outside my bedroom window was quiet and empty—no lights sliding across the clear night sky, no monstrous figures lurching through the darkness, no mysterious cars parked down the street. Tiptoeing carefully across the room, I double-checked the locks on my door and tumbled back into bed. Wearily, I pulled out my phone, swiped my passcode, and opened up our shared thread.

_night guys (9:48PM)_

_can’t sleep lol (Marco • 10:36PM)_

_no news (Rachel • 11:12PM)_

_alls well (11:48PM)_

_can’t sleep lol (Marco • 12:34AM)_

_still working on hw (Rachel • 1:16AM)_

_np (1:49AM)_

_can’t sleep lol (Marco • 2:33AM)_

_stfu marco (Rachel • 3:15AM)_

I tapped _np_ again, pushing send just as the time ticked over to 3:47. It was an empty, meaningless gesture—if the Yeerks managed to take one of us in the night, they would almost certainly _also_ be capable of sending a fake all-clear, and smart enough to do so—but we’d unanimously agreed that it was better to wake up to _something._

Setting the phone aside, I stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and began to demorph.

In the days since we’d met Elfangor, I had undergone over a dozen transformations. I had been a dog, a falcon, an alien—four times!—and a squirrel, and the DNA of a handful of other animals, hastily acquired from Cassie, floated somewhere in my blood or my brain or wherever the morphing technology stored its templates.

But this transformation was the strangest by far, precisely because it _wasn’t._ I could feel the process working, feel the subtle shift and tingle as it filtered every cell and molecule, calling my true body back from hyperspace as it disassembled the construct particle by particle. And yet, as I lay there, the only _noticeable_ change was the gradual shrinking of my fingernails.

It had taken us an embarrassingly long time to stumble upon the idea of a marker, a trigger—some tangible difference that could separate the morph, in our minds, from the original. But in the end, it had proven to be that simple. Marco acquired me, Marco morphed me, I trimmed my fingernails, I acquired myself. A little over a minute and a half later, and the fingernails were back.

It was an _exhilarating_ hack, the first unconditionally good news we’d had since Elfangor’s death, and it would have been cause for celebration if we hadn’t already been dead on our feet from exhaustion. Access to thought-speak alone would have been worth the hassle of demorphing and remorphing every two hours, and on top of that, we would be able to heal any non-lethal injury in minutes, and to morph out from under a Yeerk stunner without giving ourselves away.

“Of course, if they infest us in between, we might still be screwed,” Marco had pointed out. “Elfangor’s little earplugs probably aren’t staying put.” But in that case, Rachel had argued, what was to stop us from simply demorphing, and scattering the Yeerk’s atoms into nothingness?

We’d done a little test, each within a carbon copy of our own bodies, downing Doritos and Pop Tarts until we couldn’t eat any more, then demorphing to find ourselves hungry again. It wasn’t conclusive, by any means, but the chill we’d all felt when we remorphed a moment later and were _still_ hungry…

Rachel had seemed almost _eager_ , after that.

Running a thumb along my fingertips, I stifled a yawn and refocused. It was Tuesday night—technically Wednesday morning—and school would be cancelled for two more days. We’d been on alert for three nights already, and I could feel the beginnings of a headache behind the bridge of my nose, and that little pain you get in your neck when it hasn’t rested long enough. I kicked and tugged at my sheets, trying to find a comfortable position as my body slowly disappeared and was replaced by a copy of itself.

 _Four more hours,_ I thought to myself. Four more hours, and then it would be time to get up, and then—

Well. One way or another, the next night would be different.

My armor in place, I closed my eyes and rolled over, slowly sinking back into my nightmares.

 

*        *        *

 

My name is Jake Berenson.

It’s weird, to think that that’s now a secret. Like one of those fairy tales, where people who know your true name have ultimate power over you. If the Yeerks find out who I am…

Well, they won’t _quite_ have ultimate power over me. Cassie had gone through hell, but at least the implants had worked.

They can take my parents, though, and my brother Tom.

Take my friends, the ones who aren’t a part of our little resistance movement.

They can take my neighbors, my teachers, my coach, my troop leader.

In the end, they’re going to try to take everybody.

How much does it take, to break a person? How hard would it be for the Yeerks to push me over the edge, if they had everyone I loved, and knew me like they’d raised me, like they’d grown up beside me?

In my dreams, Tom had killed himself, over and over, a hundred different ways, and laughed each time as he died.

The Yeerks didn’t need ultimate power. Regular power was more than enough.

I’m a younger brother, you know. I think that makes a difference. Marco and Cassie and Tobias—sort of—they’re all only children. Rachel’s got two younger sisters, but she was almost six by the time Jordan was born. She remembers what it was like to be the only kid in the family—she _became_ an older sister.

I’ve _always_ been a younger brother. As long as I’ve lived, there’s always been somebody bigger and stronger, somebody with more knowledge, more power, more respect. Not that Tom’s a bad guy—we get along just fine, most of the time. But that gap, that difference—it’s real, and it matters. Tom is three years older than me. He was already in high school by the time I got to middle school. He got his license just before Christmas last year, and inherited Dad’s old Nissan.

I got a PS4. At the time, I was thrilled.

When I was maybe nine years old, our parents decided they were tired of the way Tom and I were constantly bickering with one another, and ordered us to find another way to settle our differences. After some spirited debate, we settled on rock-paper-scissors, best two out of three.

It seemed fair, at the time. I mean, you’ve got exactly three options, right? You win, you lose, or you draw. No gray areas. Simple. Straightforward.

Except, as it happened, I was a _lot_ better at rock-paper-scissors than my older brother. Turns out if you understand how someone thinks—I mean _really_ understand, on a deep, intuitive level—you can cut those three options down to one without much trouble. For a few short weeks, I won _every_ argument. One day, I even wrote down _scissors scissors rock paper rock rock rock paper_ in advance, put it in my back pocket, and proceeded to win all eight tosses. Tom locked me in a closet, Dad made him do all the yardwork, and we switched to flipping coins after that.

It’s not that my brother is stupid, or unimaginative, or especially predictable. It’s just that growing up with him forced me to _pay attention—_ to perfect a kind of awareness that Tom never had any incentive to develop. It wasn’t a conscious thing. It’s not like I was thinking _hmmm, he threw rock last time and lost, so he’d stick with rock to surprise me, except he_ knows _I’d predict that, so he’s actually going to switch to paper!_ No, I just looked at him, and some part of my brain spat out _paper_ or _scissors_ or _rock_ , and if I listened to it, I won, nine times out of ten.

Against Marco and Rachel, it was more like seven or eight.

Against random kids in the cafeteria, it was closer to six—not great, but still enough to win more often than I lost.

It’s not hard, when there are only three choices, and there’s always a right answer. When you can look the other person in the eye and get a sense of how they think, even if you don’t know them all that well. When there’s nothing real at stake, and you can just keep playing until even the tiniest edge starts to make a difference in your favor.

But that’s not the game we’re playing now.

I’d lucked out, with Tobias. It had felt right, waiting by the cube for him to come back, but I didn’t have that same sense of _certainty_ that I had with Tom. Tobias was still just too much of a stranger, even after almost a year of hanging out with him in the halls at school. I’d been completely thrown when he said he was going after Elfangor’s brother, and I _still_ didn’t know whether I’d been right to trust him about the kid, Garrett.

And if I couldn’t even predict _Tobias_ —

We have no idea who the Yeerks really are, deep down inside. No idea _what_ they are. How they think, or what they want, or how far they’ll go to get it, or even how they _define_ ‘far.’

They executed the Chapmans for no apparent reason, in the middle of the night, when the three of them had no plausible excuse for being out in a car together.

They took Cassie’s mother in a preemptive move, allegedly as part of a larger strategy to keep rogue Andalites from acquiring powerful Earth morphs.

They had infested a number of cops, firefighters, and EMTs, and were using those hosts to respond to Controller distress signals, and maybe just to infest anybody who called 911.

They had set up shop in a medium-sized city on the Pacific coast, instead of in Washington or New York or Beijing—where they’d have had easy access to power—or the middle of some quiet, backwater village—where they wouldn’t have had to worry about being discovered.

They were traveling in pairs, converting whole families, carrying stunners and communicators and spare Yeerks apparently just in case, but they’d _also_ somehow missed the five of us cowering pretty much out in the open in the middle of a construction site.

The scattered facts made no sense together, formed no recognizable pattern. It was an opaque mixture of smart and stupid, capable and incompetent. And my little black box _needed_ a pattern—needed _something_ to latch on to, before it was willing to offer up predictions, to throw its support behind one plan or another.

I could have recruited Tom, gone back for the cube after Tobias and Garrett left—could have brought him immediately into our circle, into the fight.

Would that have been good, bad, or neutral?

I could use Elfangor’s body—morph into an Andalite in the middle of the mall or the stadium or downtown, pretend to be an alien coming _out_ of disguise and just start yelling  <Take me to your leader.>

Win, lose, or draw?

We could hijack a plane—or better yet, a Bug fighter—and crash it into the center of town, try to take out the Yeerk pool. Or fly it up into orbit, to whatever mothership the Yeerks had hidden up there. We could kidnap the president—or try, anyway—hold her for three days, and then give her the morphing power. We could start building an army, or give the morphing cube _to_ the Army.

The problem was, none of those ideas were good _or_ bad, on their own. Rock, by itself, isn’t a winning throw. It isn’t _anything_ , except in relation to scissors or paper or another rock. And we had no way of knowing what the Yeerks were thinking, what they were planning, what they were going to do next.

The solution, Marco had said, was to try to find a move which was good under _any_ circumstances—something the Yeerks couldn’t anticipate or twist to their advantage.

No, Rachel had argued, the solution was _not to play_. To get clear, regroup, gather more information. We’d almost lost Cassie, she’d pointed out. It would only take one mistake to lose _everything._

To which Marco had countered that all the Yeerks needed to win was for us to do nothing.

And that’s when my phone had buzzed, and Rachel’s just after.

Apparently, the Yeerks had bought Cassie’s off-the-cuff cover story. Bought it so completely that they’d written off Cassie entirely, and thrown in both of her parents for good measure. They’d put a fifteen-second slot on the morning news, announcing the tragic deaths of Walter, Michelle, and Cassie Withers, in an accident on Thistledown Road involving a deer, a tree, and no other vehicles.

We’d sort of stopped arguing for a few minutes, after that.

“Loose ends,” Marco had growled, once Rachel and I managed to get ourselves mostly under control. “They’re getting rid of any host whose identity has been compromised. Which means there _are_ Andalite bandits out there—they must have figured out that Mr. Chapman was a Controller, so the Yeerks took him out of the picture before they could expose him or follow him to the pool or whatever.”

“We have to—somebody has to—to tell Cassie,” Rachel had said, her voice still catching on silent sobs.

I hadn’t responded to either of them. On the surface, I was still reeling. My brain kept replaying a memory of Cassie’s parents from a week before, the last time I’d had dinner at her house. It was somehow impossible to imagine that kitchen being dark and silent and empty.

But on a deeper level, everything else was falling into place. Like a marble in a game of Mouse Trap, Marco’s theory had clicked, rolled, and tumbled through my little black box, setting in motion half a dozen tiny chain reactions, leaving me with a sudden feeling of clarity.

The Yeerks were _afraid._

Not careful, not prudent, not cautiously circumspect, but actively and aggressively paranoid. They were jumping at shadows. They were genuinely worried about the threat of exposure, so much so that they’d staged _two_ car accidents in as many days, just to keep their operation hidden from Andalite eyes.

They were vulnerable.

They were vulnerable, and I was angry.

“New plan,” I’d said, my voice coming out brittle and sharp. “Marco, you can get your dad out if you want, but _you_ need to stick around. Rachel—we don’t know where Cassie is, and there’s no point wasting time tracking her down.”

I didn’t think—not exactly. There wasn’t really _time_ to think. I just knew, as if a switch had been flipped—as if I’d known all along, and had only just remembered.

I still had no idea who the Yeerks really were. I didn’t understand all of the choices they were making, wouldn’t have dared to predict where the war would go in two weeks or two months or two years. But I thought I knew what they were going to do _next._

And scissors beat paper.

“We’re going after the pool.”

 

*        *        *

 

<Run it by me one more time, and this time _listen_ to yourself. >

I sighed, fiddling absentmindedly with the controls of the racing game as the clock ticked down to zero and the words YOU LOSE flashed across the screen. Around me, the arcade echoed with the sounds of lasers and laughter, packed with kids enjoying the impromptu vacation.

<They’re trying to keep a low profile,> I said, holding the beam of my thoughts narrow so that only Marco could hear them. He was a hundred yards away, shadowing our target as she ate dinner in the food court. <It’s already a stretch that two families with kids in the same grade both died in car wrecks one after the other. They’re going to want to wait until all of this settles down before they make any new moves.>

<Yeah, I’m with you on _that_ part. Fits with what Cassie said about free spread being on pause, or whatever. And sure, yeah, that makes this a good time to try to make _our_ first move. But this chick hasn’t done anything weird or suspicious at all. >

<We haven’t been watching her the whole time.>

Reaching into my pocket, I dug out another four quarters and dropped them into the machine, double-taking as I had every time at the unexpected shade of my skin. I was incognito, wearing the body of a random teenager from the far side of town. We’d biked over to the other mall on Monday evening, and Marco had done some incredibly stupid patter about practicing hypnosis, somehow convincing a bunch of people to let us hold their hands long enough to acquire them.

<Look,> I continued. <There was no wreck, right? And they have Cassie’s parents’ bodies, but no Cassie. So fine, they tell everybody it’s got to be a closed-casket thing, but there’s always _some_ family member that has to take a look. To identify them and stuff. And Cassie’s aunt Mikayla is the only one in town. >

<So they bring her in Sunday night, infest her on the spot, and she fields the questions for anybody else who’s being nosy—>

<—and now it’s Wednesday, and she’s due for a visit to the Yeerk pool.>

On the screen, my car slammed into a railing and spun out, dropping me from fourth place down to eleventh.

<This is so thin I can’t use it for _toilet_ paper, man. Like, I can’t even count how many ways this whole thing falls apart. Maybe they didn’t make her a Controller in the first place. Maybe they did, but not until Monday, or maybe she just went to the pool yesterday while we were all stuck at the Chapman memorial thing. I mean, just because Elfangor said every three days doesn’t mean it’s three days exactly, right? And even if she _is_ a Controller and she _does_ lead us to the pool, what’s stopping them from having some kind of crazy force field bio-filter in place? It’s what I’d do, if I was worried about Andalite bandits. Or worse, this whole thing could be one giant trap. >

<It’s not a trap,> I said flatly.

Yanking the wheel, I skidded out again, this time falling completely off the map. I’d already poured eight dollars into the game over the past ten minutes. If I didn’t pull it together soon, I was going to run out of money.

The problem was, everything that Marco was saying was true. It _was_ full of holes, and I _was_ making a ton of assumptions. But every time I tried to lay out a good argument, I just couldn’t find the right words. Like how the Yeerks’ fear meant that the pool wasn’t secure yet, which meant there _weren’t_ any crazy force fields, and we would be able to infiltrate it. Or how the Yeerks would know humans well enough by now to grab Cassie’s aunt and use her, but how Andalites _wouldn’t_ know humans well enough to anticipate it, and how the Yeerks _knew_ that, so they’d see it as a safe move and wouldn’t guard against it the way they were probably guarding against us tracking down one of the cops or EMTs…

Somewhere inside my little black box, it all added up. But there were too many layers, too many ifs. I couldn’t keep up with Marco when it came to logic-chopping, and so I was leaning on my “authority” pretty hard.

<We can always bail,> I reminded him. <If things start looking dicey. And it’s not like we’ve wasted a ton of time trailing Mikayla. If she doesn’t lead us anywhere tonight, we call it off and switch to plan B.>

Marco was silent for a moment. <Just make me one promise,> he said finally. <If it turns out you _are_ right, don’t go nuts and start thinking you have some kind of spider sense, okay? Because right for the wrong reasons is only a _tiny_ bit better than flat-out wrong. >

I hesitated, trying to come up with a good response, and then another voice broke into my thoughts.

<She’s on the move. Marco, you on us?>

<Yeah, I’ve got you. She’s getting up to dump her tray—safe bet she’s headed back to her car. I’ll follow and let you know when to bail out. Jake, time to roll.>

It was tough, trying to tail a possible Controller with only three people, especially when we had no idea where the Yeerk pool might be, or what its entrance might be like. For all we knew, Mikayla would just duck into a bathroom somewhere and never come back out.

So we’d settled on a rotation. One of us would stick to her—literally—in fly morph, one of us would tail her from a distance in a human disguise, and the third person would be on standby, watching the clock and moving the bags of extra clothes we’d brought into position for emergency demorphs. Tagging out was tricky—the fly couldn’t really see anything further than two or three feet away, so we either had to know exactly where Mikayla would be in advance, or we had to coordinate a drop-off at close range.

I got up and left the arcade at a brisk walk, demorphing inside my clothes as I went, keeping the process slow enough that none of the other mall patrons would notice. Mikayla’s car was in the outdoor parking lot, just a short walk from the closest entrance.

<Yep, she’s leaving. Jake, ETA is maybe three minutes, maybe less. Want me to slow her down?>

I pushed my way through the double doors and out into the sunlight. <No, I’ve got it,> I said, just as my ability to thought-speak disappeared.

Walking over to her car, I did a quick spin to confirm that no one else was nearby or paying attention, and then dropped to the ground and rolled underneath. I would have to leave my shirt, shorts, and flip-flops behind; fortunately, they were Tom’s old beach clothes, and probably wouldn’t be missed.

Taking a deep breath, I focused my mind and felt the changes begin.

So far, every morph had been different, and every morph had been horrible in one way or another. Once, while morphing Elfangor, the bones for my extra fingers had simply shot out of the side of my hands, the flesh and skin crawling up them afterward like some kind of creepy time-lapse of vines growing.

This time, the first thing to change was my vision. For a moment, everything went dim and blurry, and then the world sort of shattered as I felt my eyeballs bulge and divide, becoming the compound eyes of an insect.

Fortunately, my human brain wasn’t quite equipped to process all the new information, so I couldn’t see too much detail as the hairs on my arms began to thicken into razor-like barbs, or as my skin turned black and waxy like burnt brownies.

<Drop off now, Rachel,> said Marco. <Head for the heavenly smell—the dumpster’s thirty feet to your left, and the coast is clear. Jake, two minutes, give or take.>

<I’m not going to be airborne in time to guide you into the car, Jake,> Rachel warned. <Hope you can figure it out.>

It was still too early for me to reply by thought-speak. I had started to shrink, the shirt and shorts ballooning around me as my arms and legs shriveled and another pair of limbs started to squirm their way out of my abdomen. I felt a kind of peeling sensation on my back, and suddenly my skin split into sheets and became wings.

I’m pretty sure that whatever Andalite scientist came up with morphing belongs firmly in the “mad” category. I wondered vaguely how they’d gone about testing the technology, and whether they’d thought to include some kind of numbing factor right from the start, or whether they’d figured that out only after some poor test subject lost his mind from the pain.

<Testing,> I called out. <Can you hear me?>

<Roger,> came the reply. <This is Marco; Rachel’s demorphing. Mikayla will be at the car in about one minute. You going to be ready?>

The shrinking stopped, and the sloshing and grinding slowed as the last few changes fell into place. <Yeah. Coming out from under the car now.>

Ever wondered what it would be like to be the Flash? Not just to zip around at supersonic speeds, but to go from zero to a million in the blink of an eye?

Flies are _fast._

One second, I was under the car, surrounded by the smells of sweat, detergent, and motor oil. The next, I was clinging to the door of the car, feeling the heat of the afternoon sun, completely indifferent to the fact that my whole world had turned sideways. In between, I’d traveled what felt like a hundred miles while strapped to the nose of a rocket.

You wouldn’t think being a fly would be fun, compared to being a dog or a bird or an alien. But once you got past the all-consuming grossness of the situation, it was like riding the ultimate rollercoaster. Forward, backward, sideways, upside-down—the fly didn’t care. It could change direction four or five times in a _second_.

I counted in my head as I waited, fighting the fly’s instinctive desire to move, to hide, to follow the smell of food. If I was interpreting the wild mosaic of my vision correctly, I had managed to plant myself just behind the driver’s side door, low enough to the ground to avoid notice against the dark color of the paint.

<Now,> Marco said, just as I sensed the vibrations and pressure changes of someone approaching the car. A continent moved—the door opening—a giant swept past—Mikayla, slipping into the driver’s seat—and in another flash, I was inside the car, hunkering down on the floor in the back. <I’m in,> I reported.

<Roger. Time is 6:48. Your limit was two-oh-four, right? So counting the minute you just spent waiting, you’ve got until 8:51. Rachel, you up yet?>

<Almost. I’ll be able to catch up—just give me a direction.>

<North exit. Heading toward midtown. Looks like she’s not going home just yet.>

<Can you stay on her?>

<Yeah, there’s plenty of traffic. Going dark for a minute while I reset my clock.>

For a few minutes, all was quiet. I could feel the rumbling of the car as it rolled down the rough pavement, sense the lurching as Mikayla braked and accelerated. I had a sense that seemed to correspond to hearing, but it was impossible to make out actual sounds—everything was muffled and alien, the fly brain built to mine the data for food and threats and nothing else. <Rachel,> I called out tentatively. <Any guesses where we’re going?>

<Doesn’t look like she’s headed for the school,> Rachel answered back. <She’s driving down Church Street. There’s the YMCA, city park, a bunch of strip malls and small stores and stuff. Maybe the courthouse? Tough to say.>

The car lurched again, and a cheese ball rolled out from under one of the seats. I resisted the sudden urge to vomit on it, and tried not to think about the fact that I had a proboscis. <Okay,> I said. <I guess I’ll settle in.>

 

*        *        *

 

<Um. Jake. Anything weird just happen on your end?>

I felt a little spike of fear and took stock of my surroundings. I was somewhere near Mikayla’s right ankle, riding along as she walked through the hallways of the YMCA. Marco and Rachel were both outside—Marco in osprey morph, Rachel in human disguise, wearing one of the sets of spare clothes.

I could hear/feel the sound of impacts in the distance, the low variable murmur that I was beginning to associate with speech, the buffeting wind that came and went with each step Mikayla took. What little I could see of the hallway seemed completely normal—fluorescent lights, dingy tile, pale blue walls with peeling paint.

<Nothing, why?>

<Because you just disappeared.>

I felt another spike, larger this time, and almost lost control to the fly body, which was extremely unhappy about remaining so still for so long. < _What?_ > I demanded.

<I’m looking at the hallway you should be walking down, and Mikayla’s not there. I can see it through the windows, and it’s completely empty. That guy at the desk buzzed you through the door, I saw you go through it, but you didn’t show up on the other side.>

<I—what—>

<Some kind of portal?> Rachel asked, her voice taut. <Or a hologram?>

<Jake, what do you see?>

I looked around again, trying to make sense of the insane swirl of images. <Nothing,> I said. <I mean, not nothing—it looks like a normal hallway. I think I can hear basketballs. It smells the same as it did thirty seconds ago. I—I don’t think I teleported anywhere, or anything like that.>

Mikayla’s footsteps slowed, and I felt another rush of air as she pushed open a door and stepped into a stairwell.

<Safe money’s on hologram, then,> Marco said. <Looks like you were right after all, Jake.>

<Should he bail?> Rachel asked. <Should we go in after him?>

<Not yet,> I ordered, clamping down on my own fear. <We need information. So far we’ve still got nothing.>

<Where are you?>

<In a stairwell. At the end of the hallway, I think. Feels like we’ve gone down…two stories?> There was another rush of air, this time bringing with it a barrage of new sounds and smells. <Out of the stairwell now. I’m in another hallway, I think—no, wait. A—a bathroom? Locker room?>

I heard an echo of grim laughter in my head. <The subterranean pool at the center of the city,> Marco said, his voice bitter. <The YMCA pool? The one that’s basically the basement of the entire building?>

<Holy crap,> Rachel breathed. <I thought—the way Elfangor said it—>

<Yeah, me, too. But I guess this is more their style, anyway. I mean, why build something from scratch when you can just steal and repurpose? Plumbing, power, restricted access…>

<I’m jumping ship,> I broke in. <This room sounds like it’s empty except for Mikayla. I’m going to try to find a corner and get into a morph with better senses.>

<Jake, be careful!>

 _No shit._ Launching myself away from Mikayla’s ankle, I did a quick aerial tour of the space. It was hard to be sure, but it _looked_ like a locker room. Perching on the ceiling, I peered down at the blurred shape that was Cassie’s aunt. She was shuffling around, bending and twisting without going anywhere.

Changing clothes.

I let go of the rough surface of the drop ceiling and headed for the opposite corner of the room, moving at approximately Mach seven. There was a series of quiet, dark cells that might have been showers or changing rooms. I zipped into one of them and paused again, unable to stop myself from rubbing my forelimbs together.

Mikayla’s movements were like a thunderstorm, distant and muffled, the pressure waves broken and distorted as they bounced off the walls and ceiling and wormed their way into the enclosed space of the stall. After a couple of minutes, they tapered off, ending with a pair of loud bangs that might have been doors slamming shut. Then there was silence.

<Demorphing,> I broadcast, unable to keep the tension out of my tone. <If you don’t hear from me in three minutes, something’s gone wrong.>

If I’d had a heart, it would have been pounding. Every instinct I had was crying for me to stay hidden, to stay small, to find my way out of the locker room and out of the building. I wanted nothing less than to find myself naked and alone in a women’s locker room in the middle of a bodysnatcher stronghold.

But alongside the fear was an icy, uncompromising resolve. They had taken Cassie’s family. They were going to try to take mine. And Marco and Rachel were waiting, would take either inspiration or discouragement from my example.

_How far would you go, if the fate of your species hung in the balance?_

No, that was the wrong question. As I hesitated, I saw once more the image from my nightmares, my brother Tom laughing as the Yeerk inside his head dragged a knife across his throat.

_Never._

Focusing, I began to change, my mind already leaping ahead to the next phase of the operation. I had over a dozen options to choose from—dog, squirrel, falcon, various humans. Most of them I hadn’t actually morphed yet—tiger, wolf, bat, spider, lizard.

_The lizard._

Cassie had called it a six-lined something-or-other. It was small, only a little over six inches, and not particularly brightly colored. It could see and hear well enough to catch bugs, which meant I should be able to get a sense of my environment. It could climb. Most importantly, it was fast—Cassie had said they could sprint up to eighteen miles per hour, and were almost impossible to catch.

The decision made, I wasted no time in starting my next morph. Ninety seconds later, I was skittering across the empty locker room, hugging the grime-coated corner as I headed for the door.

<Rachel,> I called out. <What time is it?>

<7:11. You’ve got until 9:15.>

<Marco. Can you see the pool from the outside? Through the windows?>

<Yeah. Looks totally normal. Maybe twenty people swimming, ten people around the edges, couple of lifeguards.>

<Rachel. Can you get into the lobby? Start asking about memberships, maybe get a sense of what people have to do to get past the door guard?>

<On it. Where are you?>

<I’m in lizard morph, leaving the locker room. I think I can make it down the hall without anybody seeing me.>

Roughly a thousand Controllers, visiting the Yeerk pool every three days. Call it three hundred and fifty per day, probably sticking to business hours. Thirty five or so per hour. One arriving every two minutes, on average, probably with some big spikes in the morning before school and in the evening after work.

There would be someone in the hallway.

Reaching the door, I flattened myself out and stuck my head under the crack. I tasted the air, my eyes swiveling to take in the scene. Sure enough, there were two men just emerging from the stairwell. I waited until they disappeared around the corner, and then darted after them, still sticking close to the wall.

They were disappearing into the men’s locker room, the door swinging shut behind them. Ahead of me ran another long hallway, this one ending in a pair of double doors with a large blue sign reading POOL.

<Found the pool,> I said. I darted forward again, the lizard’s powerful legs churning underneath me, and stopped a few feet short of the entrance. This one was tightly sealed, with a kind of brush or comb at the bottom of each door, as if to keep out dust. I would have to wait for someone else to come through.

<Has it occurred to you that maybe now is the time to bail?>

I could tell by the intonation that it was Marco, and that the question was private, audible only to me. <We still don’t have any real information,> I pointed out. <We don’t know what the pool looks like, or what goes on inside, or how to disrupt it. We don’t even really know that this is the place—not for sure.>

<It’s the place,> Marco said darkly. <The people in the pool just looped. Like a gif. It’s another hologram, a recording—maybe five minutes long.>

<All the more reason to get inside and take a look.>

<You’re alone in there, man. You run into trouble, it’s going to be a long ten minutes before Rachel and I can get close enough to help.>

In front of me, there was a click, and then the door swung open. A woman emerged, followed by the sound of screaming. <Too late,> I said, rushing forward as the door began to close.

And before Marco could object, I stepped across the threshold, and into hell on earth.


	8. Marco

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marco attempts to stave off disaster.

**Chapter 08: Marco**

I’ve always believed in the power of laughter.

It sounds so dumb, right? Like some corny thing Dumbledore would say to Harry Potter instead of, y’know, actually teaching him a useful spell.

But it’s true. Laughter is a shield. It’s a crutch. It’s a lifeline, when the rest of the universe is trying to tear you up, drag you down, grind you away. When my mom disappeared, my dad stopped laughing, and looking back, that’s what really made the difference between him and me. It’s why he fell apart, and why I managed to hold together. Being able to joke about stuff doesn’t make it better, but it’s _something._

Sometimes, though, there really is nothing to laugh about. No silver lining. Nothing but fear and darkness and pain.

<Hang in there, buddy,> I said, trying desperately to inject some kind of soothing quality into my thought-speak. I was as close to the building as I dared to get, perched on a small sapling just a dozen or so feet away from the false windows. The illusion was perfect—color, depth, everything. I could hear the muffled sound of laughter, the echoing splash as the fat kid belly-flopped off the diving board, exactly the same as when he’d done it five minutes earlier.

All lies.

<There’s kids here, Marco,> Jake whispered, his words just for me, and even through the filter of my own inner voice, I could hear his horror, his despair. I’d never heard Jake sound like that before, not even when he was losing his shit over Cassie going missing. It was like he was made of glass, hollow and empty inside.

<We’re on it, man,> I babbled. <We’re going to put a stop to it.>

<There’s kids, and they come in with their parents, and they get in line, and they don’t play or fidget or—or say _anything_ , not one word, and then they bend over the water, and the Yeerk drops out, and all of a sudden they’re—there’s one girl, she’s only like five or six, she still hasn’t stopped screaming. I think her—her mom, I think her mom is the one who’s guarding the cages, she hasn’t even _looked_ at her—oh, _Christ_ —>

<Jake, listen to me, buddy, are you safe? Are you in a good hiding spot?>

<And the things on the pier—they’re like demons, man, like actual demons with horns and spines and claws and spiked tails and—>

The last time I’d felt this useless, this impotent, had been when Mom’s boat washed up on shore without her in it.

<Jake, man, you’re scaring me. Pull it together, tell me you’re somewhere where nobody can see you.>

<What? …yeah. Yeah, I’m in a corner, on the roof of the supply closet. It’s all dark, no one can see me. I can see. I can see.>

<Do you need backup? Do you need me and Rachel?>

I wanted to kick myself for letting him go in there alone. I wanted to kick myself for letting him talk me into the whole Mikayla scheme in the first place. I’d been so sure his magical predictions were bullshit that I hadn’t really stopped to ask myself what we’d do if it turned out he was _right._

And now my best friend was in the middle of a Yeerk stronghold, and I was totally, completely, utterly helpless.

<No,> Jake answered. There was a strange mental sensation, like the telepathic equivalent of someone sucking in a breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was firmer, some of its authority returning. <No, I’m okay. Sorry. I can—I’ve got this. It’s just—Jesus, Marco. This is so much worse than we thought. So much worse in every way. This is like, Auschwitz-level bad.>

We needed to get him out of there.

<Rachel,> I beamed privately. <Any updates on security at the—>

<DON’T DO THAT.>

<Do—what?>

<Shut up. Can’t talk.>

<We’re going to make them pay for this.>

Jake’s voice, right on the heels of Rachel’s. I tried to answer both of them at once and ended up saying nothing at all.

<Now. Tonight. This can’t be allowed to continue.>

He still sounded hollow, but it was the hollowness of steel. <Might be a little premature there, Fearless Leader,> I said. I was pumping for altitude, trying to get enough height to circle back around to the front of the building. The YMCA was built into the side of a hill, with the main entrance at ground level on the top floor, and the pool dug into the basement on the opposite side. <Something’s up with Rachel.>

<What?>

<Not sure,> I said tersely. <I pinged her, and she told me to shut up. Sounded tense. I’ll have eyes on her in ten more seconds.>

Nine seconds later, I was back up to the front, able to see Rachel through the windows of the lobby. She was wearing the body of a single mom she’d acquired during our field trip to the other side of town. She looked fine, if a little flushed.

<Looks okay,> I reported. <She’s still talking to—no, wait, she’s just now wrapping up with the girl at the front desk.>

<Stay on her. I’m going to check out the inside of this closet-shed thing.>

<Jake, hold on a—>

<Whichever one of you interrupted in the middle of my sentence, you almost made me say my name out loud. You _did_ make me ask if they were open on nights and any updates on security. >

It took me a long moment to disentangle her sentence as I angled toward another tree, half of my brain still worried about Jake while the other half fought the osprey body’s intense interest in the squirrels below. Beneath me, Rachel pushed her way out through the front doors and set off down the sidewalk, her pace casual.

<Well, _there’s_ a problem,> I said, filing it away alongside the resonance issue that Tobias had warned us about. <Although I guess this means we can make morning announcements a lot more interesting now.> I swiveled my head to look at the girl sitting inside at the front desk. She was leaning back in her chair, idly tapping at her phone. <Jake—>

<I’m inside the closet. There’s a bunch of stuff here—looks like weapons, maybe some heavy machinery. I can’t really see, but I think maybe half of it is alien, half of it human.>

<I’m demorphing,> Rachel interjected.

<Wait,> I called out to both of them at once. The split conversations were piling up on top of my own thoughts, too fast for me to juggle, adding to my growing sense that everything was spiraling out of control. <Just—hold on a second, both of you. We need to stop and think. Jake, we need to get you out of there and regroup.>

<No,> came a voice in my head.

<Which one of you was that?> I asked.

<Me. Jake. I’m not leaving until we find a way to shut this whole thing down.>

<We came here for intel—we’re not ready for any kind of mission. Let’s quit while we’re ahead.>

<I still haven’t checked any of the doors leading away from the main area, or any of the rest of the building.>

<Rachel,> I pleaded. <Help me out, here.>

<Marco’s got a point,> Rachel said. <Jake, are you _sure_ you’re not in the middle of an ambush? What if they know you’re there? >

<I’ve been climbing all over this place for ten minutes now,> Jake pointed out. <Nobody’s following me, nobody’s hanging around. Everybody’s either got a job or they’re in a cage. Plus, I’ve seen a bunch of bugs and spiders and at least one mouse. If this is a trap, I don’t know why they’d still be waiting.>

<They could be waiting for you to demorph,> I offered.

<Or for him to call for backup, in which case they’d capture more than one of us.>

<No,> Jake said firmly. <Doesn’t fit. Not their style.>

I clamped down on my objection. Jake’s whole Professor X thing was a good bit more than I was ready to swallow, but this wasn’t the time to nitpick. <This is crazy,> I said. <We don’t have anything even remotely resembling a plan, here. Why don’t you come back out, we can figure out a strategy, come back again tomorrow?>

<We might not have until tomorrow,> Jake said. <They’re building something around the inside of the doorway. Alien tech, red lights. Ten bucks says it’s not for catching shoplifters.>

I did the avian equivalent of frowning, which was apparently hunching one’s shoulders and rustling one’s feathers. There were too many threads, too many threats—too many plausible possibilities, and almost none of them good. Even if they _hadn’t_ noticed Jake’s presence, that could all change in an instant, and the lizard body had almost nothing going for it in a fight. It was obvious that we were overextended, but at the same time, if he was _right_ —if it really was now or never—

_He’s just saying that because he’s pissed off and he wants to do some damage._

True. But the Yeerks probably _were_ planning to beef up their security. They had to know that a buzzer at the door wasn’t going to cut it in the long run.

<Rachel,> I called out. <What’s the deal up at the front door?>

<Six people came out, five more went in while I was talking to the girl at the desk. They all had little laminated IDs, and I think maybe there’s passwords—more than one password. She kept using different greetings, and the people walking by sounded pretty natural, but I think the first and fifth person had the same combination. I think, anyway. She said something like, “hey, you’re back already,” and I’m pretty sure they both answered “yeah, I’m on a roll.”>

I felt the osprey’s heartrate tick upward. <Okay, that’s not a good sign.>

<What do you mean?>

I thought the question had come from Jake, but I realized I was wrong a split second later when he answered it, his inflection unmistakable. <It means they’re smart enough to know that one password would be easy to crack and super obvious to random people hanging out in the lobby. Which means they’re _also_ smart enough to know that their current security is nowhere near good enough to keep out Andalites. >

Rachel got it right away. <So it’s going to get tighter.>

<It’s not going to get tighter _tomorrow_ ,> I argued, feeling slightly dirty as the voice in the back of my head pointed out that it absolutely might. <Jake—come on, man, we have no idea what you’re up against down there. You could walk around some corner and just get fried.>

<That’s why I’m not leaving yet. We have to know what we’re dealing with. And if I see an opportunity while I’m poking around, well—this might be our only shot.>

<Jake—>

<This isn’t a vote,> Jake said, cutting me off, and where his voice had been hollow steel, it was now diamond holding back vacuum. <Those demon things just dragged that little girl out on the pier and shoved her head under the water like they were trying to drown her, and when she came up, she wasn’t screaming anymore. I am not walking out of here until I’ve _done_ something.>

<Jake—> I began again, more softly this time.

<Marco,> Rachel interrupted. <I don’t think he’s going to listen.>

<He’d _better_ ,> I shot back privately. <This is how we end up getting ourselves killed. We can’t just charge in half-cocked—>

<I know,> she said. <I know. But—aren’t you listening? You’re not going to talk him out of this one. And besides, what if he’s right?>

<If he gets himself killed in there—>

<Saving the world, remember? I kind of get the feeling we’re not all going to make it through this thing anyway.>

I fell silent, looking down at the entrance from my perch in the tree, at the alien slave sitting behind the counter, pretending to be human. I could feel the moment slipping out of control, all of my calm, rational arguments falling flat in the face of the enormity of the situation. Jake could die. Jake could get captured. Jake could get exposed, and the rest of us could go down as a result.

But we _did_ need a way to take out the pool. It was the only weakness the Yeerks had, as far as we knew. The only way to hit them all at once. And every day that went by, they were taking more people, fortifying their position.

I remembered sitting in the woods behind Jake’s house, just a few days earlier, telling Rachel that all the Yeerks needed to win the war was for us to do nothing.

But dammit, this was _crazy._ There was _no way_ that the Yeerks had failed to put together some kind of Andalite response protocol. If they saw him—if they caught him—if he tripped some kind of hidden alarm—they were ready in all the ways that we were not. They would have guns. Force fields. Reinforcements.

And my best friend was down there alone.

<Fine,> I snapped, including Jake in the beam of my thoughts once again. <Fine. Give me twenty minutes to get down there. If you’re going to do this, I’m going to watch your back.>

<Hey, wait—what about me?> Rachel objected.

<No,> said Jake.

<What? _Why? >_

<You’ve got to stay outside so we can feed you information,> I explained. <If we both—I mean, if anything goes wrong, you and Cassie and Tobias need as much intel as possible.>

I launched myself out of the tree, spiraling down toward the roof of the building. I could demorph there and remorph into a fly—with a little guidance from Rachel, I should at least be able to find my way into the lobby, where I could hitch a ride on the next Controller to pass through.

<Besides,> I said, trying to inject a little humor into the situation, <it’s the YMCA. Men get dibs.>

For some reason, neither one of them laughed.

 

*        *        *

 

<Where’s Mikayla?> I asked as the last of my human body disappeared again, my feet curling and hardening into the sharp talons of an Australian ghost bat.

<Gone already,> Jake said. <You probably passed her on your way in without noticing.>

<So that’s, what—half and hour or so, that someone’s Yeerk needs to swim around and feed?>

We were both on top of the plastic supply closet, wedged into the back corner of the cavernous room, hidden from view by the dim lighting and the gently peaked roof. I had managed to make it all the way in as a fly, and had demorphed and remorphed as quickly as I could, fear prickling my spine as soon as it grew into place. Jake had done the same, resetting his clock. It would have been better if we could have shared the lizard morph, but we’d both acquired it from Cassie, and we still weren’t totally clear on how the interference thing worked.

<Sounds about right,> Jake said, his voice still hard and cold.

I didn’t blame him. The Yeerk pool was every bit as horrible as his reaction had led me to believe.

There were no windows—or if there were, they’d been solidly hidden by the brownish metal plates that had replaced the usual paint and tile. The space was dimly lit with a hellish red glow, like a sunset in the middle of a dust storm. The air was filled with screams and sobs, and a sulphurous, evil smell lay like a layer of smog over everything. There were six half-filled cages evenly spaced around the pool, up against the walls, each large enough to hold thirty or forty people.

But the worst by far was the pool itself. It was huge, almost Olympic-sized, and filled to the brim with a dark, sludgelike liquid that constantly swelled and splashed as the Yeerks surged beneath the surface. There were two long metal piers stretching out into the middle, each about ten feet wide. Both were manned by the demon aliens Jake had described—on the first pier, they stood by to seize people as soon as their Yeerks relinquished control, and on the second, they dragged those same people back out and forced their heads under the water.

Some of the people cried. Others yelled and fought, struggling uselessly against the seven-foot-tall monsters. The saddest were the ones who didn’t even try—who just hung there, limp, as the aliens threw them into the cages and then brought them back out half an hour later. I thought I recognized one of my old middle school teachers among them, and squeezed my eyes shut before I could be too sure.

Then I opened my eyes again. We needed to identify as many Controllers as possible, after all.

<I make twenty of those demon guys going back and forth, plus the seven humans,> I said, making sure to include Rachel in my thought-speak. <One by the main entrance, one in front of each cage, all carrying some kind of phaser-looking gun.>

<The demon guys, too?>

<No. But they don’t need them—they’ve got blades sticking out everywhere we’ve got wrinkles.>

Beside me, Jake twitched, his lizard tongue tasting the air. <Only one exit for sure,> he said. <All the Controllers have been coming and going through the main door. There are three doors along the long side of the pool—I’ve seen human guards going in and out of one of them, and demon guards going in and out of the middle one. The one on the right hasn’t opened.>

<Three doors?> Rachel said. <What do they look like?>

<Big. Metal. But, like, human metal. You know, the kind that has a handle on one side and a horizontal bar on the other.>

<There should only be two,> Rachel said. <I used to swim here. The one closest to the exit was the lifeguard’s office, and the other one was the break room. Had a snack bar, tables, arcade games, that kind of stuff.>

<Can you remember exactly where they were?> I asked.

<Doesn’t matter,> Jake cut in. <Mystery door is where we’re headed. Too much traffic through the other two to risk it. I’m betting the third one is storage or machinery or something like that. That’s where we’re going to be able to do some damage.>

<They’re all pointing back into the hillside,> I observed. <Might be machinery, but it could be an underground exit, too. Or they could be digging back there. Expanding.>

<Either way, that’s first on the list. After that, we can either go fly and try to get into the other rooms, or get out and check out the rest of the place. There’s a lot more to this building than just the pool.>

We set off across the darkened space—Jake darting along the floor, hugging the wall, and me flitting from perch to perch, waiting for moments when no one was looking in our direction. Once, as we passed one of the cages on our side of the pool, I thought I saw one of the prisoners look up at me. But if he saw me, he gave no sign—only slumped his shoulders and sagged back against the bars.

Soon enough, we were there. I clung to a section of piping near the ceiling, feeding Rachel more observations while Jake explored the door from below.

<I can make it underneath the crack,> he said.

<Hear anything?> I asked.

<No. You?>

<Nope. Might as well take a peek. If the coast is clear, maybe you can demorph and let me in.>

I watched as Jake vanished into the tiny space between the door and the floor. <Pitch black in here,> he said. <Rough ground—dirt and rock and gravel. I get the sense that it’s pretty roomy, but I can’t hear much of anything. There’s maybe some machinery way far off in the distance? Like a constant rumbling. But nothing close by.>

<Wait by the door for a couple of minutes,> I suggested. <Be ready to bail if anything happens. If it’s safe, you can open it up for me.>

We both fell silent. I turned my head to look out across the pool, doing my best to memorize the space. I recognized four more Controllers in the various cages—two of them kids from our own school, though not from the same grade. With a small note of surprise, I noticed that the Controller guarding the cage directly across the pool was younger than me, the dangerous-looking weapon making her small hands look fragile and delicate.

_Guess age doesn’t matter much to Yeerks._

<Okay,> Jake said finally. <I feel pretty safe. I’m just going to demorph halfway—enough to open the door, then back to lizard.>

<You only need to open it about three inches,> I said. <We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.>

Of course, if the door had an alarm on it, we were boned either way. But clearly we had decided to throw caution to the winds. Besides, they had no reason to put an alarm on an internal door, right?

_Yeah, no reason at all. Definitely not like this EXACT SITUATION might have occurred to them._

With my heightened bat senses, I thought I could hear the shifting and slurping of Jake’s body as he partially demorphed on the other side of the gray metal. I wondered if half-demorphing had any affect on Jake’s time limit—if it reset his clock, or if it burned up even more of his stored charge. I made a mental note to get him out of morph a few minutes early, then realized I was being dumb and just told him.

Suddenly, the door creaked open, revealing a black space a few inches wide. I dropped like a bombshell into the crack, veering sharply to the right and latching onto one of the rough walls as the door quietly clicked shut behind me.

<It’s a tunnel,> I said, firing off an echolocation burst and letting the bat brain sort out the resulting echoes. <Maybe fifteen feet wide, round—very rough, like it was just hacked out yesterday.>

<That fits with there only being a thousand Controllers,> said someone—Rachel? <This whole operation feels like it’s still in its first month.>

<It’s long, too,> I continued. <Goes at least two hundred feet back into the hillside before it doubles back. Can’t be sure, but I think it drops off when it turns.>

With most of my attention tuned in to my sense of hearing, I also noticed the rumbling sound that Jake had reported. It sounded to me like distant digging—the scraping of dirt, the crunching of rocks. Mixed in were a million tiny clicking sounds, and an occasional otherworldly screech, like a parrot being boiled alive.

_Cheerful._

<I think whatever dug this tunnel is some kind of animal,> I added, feeling my apprehension growing again. <I can hear what sounds like digging down at the other end. Sounds like it’s pretty far off, and sounds like there’s a _lot_ of it. >

Firing off another burst, I “saw” Jake as he skittered forward, his path zigzagging a bit as he navigated the pits and rocks blind. <So we’re investigating?> I grumbled.

<There were people going in and out of the other two doors, and according to Rachel, those are just rooms. Probably the command center for the pool, and maybe barracks for those demon things. We’ll want to check them out, but this is bigger. Whatever this is, it’s not good.>

I took wing, easily outpacing Jake as I flitted through the dark tunnel, the bat brain very much at home in the dark, still air. Reaching the corner, I banked right, staying close to the ceiling. It began to slope downward at about ten degrees, the tunnel pointing back at the pool but at an angle that would take it well beneath it. This time it stretched further, maybe four hundred feet before it turned once more.

<Rachel, we might just lose contact with you,> I said. <Are you somewhere close to the ground?>

<No, but I can be,> she answered. <I’m in snipe morph. I don’t think anybody’s going to notice.>

<Jake,> I called back. <Heads up—looks like the whole thing is one big downward spiral.>

<Rachel, keep pinging us every thirty seconds or so,> Jake ordered. <If we lose touch, I want to know when and where it happens.>

<Roger.>

We continued spiraling downward for the next five minutes, taking two more turnings just like the first. The tunnel began to widen, with small offshoots appearing. I fired echolocation bursts into the first few entrances. Some of them were just tiny alcoves, but some of them opened up into caves or twisted and turned out of sight.

<This reminding you of anything?> I asked, as we took another turning and the side holes began to appear more and more frequently.

<Yeah,> Jake said grimly. <That aluminum anthill cast that Ms. Miller showed us back in sixth grade.>

<I vote we go back,> I said, fluttering up to a boulder sticking out of the wall and resting my wings. <Those noises are a _lot_ clearer now, and I’m not sure I want to meet whatever ant digs tunnels this big.>

Jake came to a halt as well, his lizard tongue tasting the air again. <Yeah,> he said. <I’m getting some really strong smells from some of the side tunnels, too, and the lizard brain doesn’t like them at all. Rachel, you still there? How much time do we have left in morph?>

<You guys remorphed only twelve minutes ago. Jake, you’ve got until 9:52—that’s an hour and fifty-two minutes. Marco’s got until 10:16—two hours sixteen.>

<Intel,> Jake said. <The more we know, the more likely we are to find something we can use to blow this whole thing sky-high.>

<Do we really have to know what’s at the _end_ of the evil fucking tunnel, to know that we’re going to need to deal with it one way or another? I’m tired of waiting for something to go wrong, here, and I’m _definitely_ starting to get a zombies-creeping-up-behind-you feeling from all those open tunnels we passed. >

<Fine,> Jake conceded. He spun around in the dark and began heading back uphill. <This the right way?>

<Mostly,> I said. <You’re going to want to bear left a little—no, _left_ , that’s the entrance to one of the offshoots—>

<AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!>

It happened in a flash—an explosion of movement and sound, followed by Jake’s psychic scream. I found myself in midair, the bat brain fully in control as I zigzagged back down the tunnel, away from danger.

<Jake!> I cried out, forcing the body’s instincts into submission and wheeling around again. I fired off another echolocation burst, and almost dropped out of the air in horror.

It was a giant centipede, almost ten feet long, its conical legs the length of butcher’s knives and each of its segments as large as a barrel. It had four irregular, jelly-like eyes spaced radially around its front end, and a gaping, circular mouth like a gun barrel, lined with rows and rows of teeth. As I watched, the monster slammed its “face” into the ground again, an awful crunching sound filling the air as it sheared away a layer of stone the size of a steering wheel.

<AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! IT ATE ME!>

<Jake, demorph! Demorph now!>

I dove toward the heaving alien monster, ignoring the bat’s desperate fear as I raked my talons across one of its jelly eyes. The thing screamed, a feral shriek that echoed down the tunnel. With heart-stopping dread, I heard another shriek in answer.

<Jake!> I cried out again.

<What’s happening?> someone shouted.

Rachel. <Jake’s down,> I shouted back, flittering around and stabbing at another of the hideous eyes, barely dodging as the monster thrashed and reached for me with a whiplike tongue. <Alien—like a giant centipede—it was completely silent, must not have even been _moving_ , I didn’t see it, didn’t hear it—JAKE!>

<I’m here!> he called out, his voice thick with panic. <I’m alive—demorphing. It got—the lizard body, it’s dying, but I think I can—>

<What do I do?> Rachel asked, frantic.

<Nothing,> I said, ripping into the alien’s third eye. <Stay there—if we go down, you have to—>

I broke off. As the alien screamed again, I heard the answering cries once more, already sounding closer. <Jake, are you going to make it?> I demanded.

<Think so. Burning—acid—can’t breathe—>

<We’re going to have company,> I said, and—hating myself—I abandoned my attack on the monster and flew back up the tunnel, landing a few dozen yards uphill. I began to demorph as quickly as I could, my mind racing to choose the right weapon—Andalite, tiger, tarantula hawk—

Behind me, the alien scream changed in pitch, grew higher and became a gurgle. I fired off another echolocation burst as my wings thickened back into arms, saw the unnatural bulge in the alien’s midsection as Jake grew within its belly. There was a horrible ripping sound, a sick-wet squelch, and with the last of my bat vision I saw a fist tearing its way through the soft tissue.

If I’d had a normal stomach, I would have vomited. A foul, greasy stench filled the air, and I heard more tearing and splattering as Jake fought his way out of the alien’s corpse, gasping for air.

How long did we have before more of them arrived? My super-sensitive hearing was gone, but I could still hear the echoing cries of other monster worms, could now make out the clatter of a thousand needle feet on rock and gravel. I was halfway out of morph, Jake was twenty seconds ahead of me—

I couldn’t see it, but I heard it. Jake’s panicked yell as the first of them arrived, turning into a wild shriek as the unmistakable sound of chomping and chewing filled the tunnel. It was like a feeding frenzy, a wild orgy of violence and hunger as what sounded like fifty other worms crammed themselves into the narrow space, all of them screeching and gnashing their teeth.

Jake screamed again, and I screamed with him, hoping to give him something to latch onto, a direction to crawl toward— _anything_. I felt Elfangor’s tail slither out of my spine, and I staggered forward, half-morphed, groping in the dark. My hands touched alien flesh, and I spun, striking out with the still-growing blade, feeling hot liquid gush across my body as I made contact.

<Jake!> I cried. There was no answer. Again and again I struck, fumbling blindly forward, following the sounds of the worms as they turned on each other and began to eat their wounded, always checking to be sure that I didn’t hit Jake, careless of my own limbs. One of the monsters got ahold of my right arm and ripped it off at the elbow before I lopped off its top quarter; another seized one of my legs and was stomped into the dirt. Behind me, Jake’s screams began to taper off, his breathing labored and weak as I carved my way further and further down the tunnel.

<Jake!> I called out again, remembering Elfangor’s mortal wound as my own blood gushed from a dozen ragged holes. <Jake, morph! Morph now!>

He offered no response, and I switched to Rachel. <Rachel, talk to Jake! Stay on him, get him to morph, don’t let up until he answers you back in thought-speak!>

<What—>

<He’s dying, just do it!>

In the back of my mind, I heard Rachel take up the call, and I let go of everything else, spinning and slicing and stomping, becoming a whirlwind of death. Finally, after what felt like twelve lifetimes, I buried my tail blade in the last of the horde, with only the fading squeaks of the dying around me. I could taste bile through my hooves, could feel whole swaths of fur and flesh missing, sense the numbness of my arm where it ended in a mangled stump. Ahead of me, further down the tunnel, I could hear another group of monsters approaching.

<Jake, are you there? Get uphill—get past the bodies, where it’s clear.>

They were cannibals—if we could get far enough past the pile, maybe none of them would bother to chase us. I followed my own advice, slowly picking my way against the gentle slope of the tunnel floor, placing each step carefully so as not to crush my friend. A wave of dizziness hit me and I stumbled, my head spinning from blood loss.

My Andalite body was dying.

<Jake!> I screamed. <Where are you?>

“I’m alive,” came the answer, weak but clear. “I think they—they ate—I couldn’t think straight—ended up in my own body. My morph armor.”

<No problem,> I said. <Can you walk?>

“Yeah. I can’t see, though. And I’m barefoot.”

<Can’t help it. Just head uphill. Left hand on the wall, right hand out in front, spiral up.>

“The holes—”

<There aren’t any of them in the higher holes,> I said. <They all came up from below.>

We began moving, Jake unsteady, my own pace slow as I demorphed in motion. Behind us, the clamor rose again as the next group of worms found the pile of corpses and began to feed.

“What—what _were_ those—”

“I don’t know,” I said, my human mouth emerging. “But whatever they are, it looks like they’re not about to pass up a free meal to come chase us.”

Far ahead of us, echoing down the tunnel, came the faint but unmistakable sound of a door slamming shut. “Dammit!” I muttered. “They’re coming down to investigate.”

“Side tunnels,” Jake said, still sounding weak and exhausted.

“Screw that.”

“Like you said…worms all down below…”

I grimaced in the darkness. He was right. Groping for his hand, I turned and retraced my steps to the last hole we’d passed. It was one of the shallow ones, going just a dozen feet back into the rock, with a slight turn to one side at the very end. I pushed Jake in front of me, hiding him in the little alcove, and began to morph once again, hoping that I still had at least one change left before exhaustion hit.

“What are you doing?” Jake asked, his voice a pale whisper.

“Gorilla,” I said. “It’s black—won’t show up in the dark.”

Twenty seconds later, a dim, unsteady glow appeared in the tunnel, brightening rapidly as the sound of running feet grew nearer. By the time the glow was bright enough to see my own hands and feet, my skin had already turned black and coarse hairs were beginning to sprout from every pore.

I’d practiced the gorilla morph just once since borrowing it from Cassie. I’d tried to rip a six-inch-thick sapling out of the ground. It hadn’t quite worked, because I’d accidentally ripped the tree in half.

<Stay back,> I warned Jake. <This thing is narrow, but if they come on hard enough, I can’t keep them all from slipping past me.>

I clenched two fists the size of cinderblocks and waited. The thunder of feet grew louder still, and the tunnel suddenly glowed bright as daylight as the investigators rounded the nearest hairpin bend—

—and ran right past our little hiding spot without so much as a glance, a dozen of the demon monsters carrying lights and what looked like ordinary human cattle prods. They were visible for barely two seconds, and then they were gone, the light dimming as they sprinted downhill toward the feeding frenzy.

_But—_

I felt my brain click into overdrive. Cannibals—tunnel diggers—bloodlust—this wasn’t the first time the monster worms had collapsed into violent chaos. The Yeerks still didn’t know we were here.

<Come on,> I said, reaching back to guide Jake out of the alcove and into the main tunnel. <We’ve got to get out of here before they come back.>

The Yeerks didn’t know we were here, which meant they _wouldn’t_ be standing in a semicircle around the door with guns. The smart thing to do was to demorph and remorph, using the fly or the lizard to sneak out the same way we’d snuck in.

But I’d heard Jake screaming in the darkness, and I remembered the damage that my own Andalite body had taken. That hadn’t been Jake-in-morph—it had been _Jake._ If he demorphed back to his own body, there was no telling whether he’d be able to hold it together long enough to make it through another change. Not to mention that I’d morphed six times myself in the past thirty minutes.

We were going to have to make a break for it.

<Rachel,> I broadcast. <You there?>

<Yes,> she replied immediately. <What’s going on? Are you both all right?>

<No,> I said. <But we’re alive.> Behind me, Jake stumbled and collapsed, and I reached back and lifted him into the air, throwing him over my shoulder. <Jake’s in a bad way. He’s human and can’t morph. I need to know the building exit closest to the pool.>

Thankfully, Rachel didn’t ask any stupid questions. <Out the double doors and immediately left,> she said. <It opens out into the lower parking lot.>

<We’re going to make a run for it,> I said. <Cover’s going to be blown. You got anything that can keep them off our backs while we bail? Something that can make a good escape on its own?>

<Cassie gave me the tiger.>

<They’ll have guns.>

<I’ll take out the ones with guns first.>

<Okay. Three minutes?>

<Five, to demorph and remorph and get in position.>

<Counting.>

I slowed as we turned around the final corner, the metal door outlined in red light two hundred feet away. <Jake,> I murmured. <You ready?>

There was no answer. Reaching up with a giant fist, I put my hand on his back. He was still breathing, long and slow and deep. He must have passed out.

 _Better that way anyway._ I lowered him gently to the floor, feeling around for a patch of dirt or mud. Finding one, I began gently painting his face and hair, obscuring his identity as best I could.

I felt strangely calm, given the circumstances. Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe it was the gorilla, who knew next to nothing of fear. But for once, I found myself unable to worry. There was nothing to plan for, no uncertainty to integrate, no options to consider. It was no longer a question of _whether_ —it had simply become a question of _when._

Behind me, the echoes of the feeding frenzy were tapering off as the demon guards restored order. How long did we have before they started making their way back up to the surface?

<Rachel?>

<Almost remorphed. Ninety seconds.>

I hauled Jake back onto my shoulder, picturing the path from door to door, the line that would take me past the cage, along the pool, and out through the half-built alien archway. I could make the run in under ten seconds, if I didn’t slow down. But there were the demon’s blades, and the armed humans—two of them directly between us and freedom.

_The cage._

I smiled. Apparently, gorillas do that.

<Go now,> Rachel whispered. <I’ll be there by the time you get out.>

I loped forward, feeling like a freight train. I was going faster than a human could run by the time I hit the door, and it flew off its hinges and skidded straight into the pool. It hadn’t even hit the water by the time I had reached the first human guard.

I sank a fist into his stomach, grateful that it wasn’t the cage across the pool—the one guarded by the little girl. I hit a little too hard, and felt a sickening _crunch_ as he went down.

Around me, the other Controllers were starting to react. I heard cries of “Andalite!” and squinted my eyes shut against the flash of some kind of laser weapon. Roaring, I picked up the fallen guard’s weapon and brandished it wildly, unable to pull the trigger but hoping that the Controllers wouldn’t realize that. I tucked it under my arm for later, took one step, and reached for the cage door.

It was locked, of course.

The gorilla didn’t care.

There was another flash of light, and I roared again as pain lanced across my shoulder. I swung the cage door like a Frisbee, and hooted with satisfaction as my attacker—the human at the entrance—dodged out of the way. The hunk of metal smashed into the weird archway flanking the double doors, and there was another flash of light as some kind of alien power supply surged and died.

I saw the demon guards, running down the piers as they moved to cut me off.

I saw the other human guards, cowering behind their guns.

I heard the prisoners yelling behind me, shouting their defiance as they poured out of the cage.

And I saw freedom in front of me.

I ran.

 

*        *        *

 

I looked at Jake.

Jake looked at me.

Around us, the patch of grass was covered in blood, spurts and spatters and one thick pool, quickly soaking into the dry earth.

“Okay,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “So you can’t demorph.”

Jake’s face was pale in the moonlight as he began to unwind the makeshift tourniquets from his left bicep, his left ankle, his right knee. He said nothing—only bit his lip as he reached into our t-shirt cache and began to wipe the gore off of his newly-reformed arms and legs.

“Maybe if we went to a hospital, got you into an emergency room first—”

“No,” Jake said, his voice cracking. “We can’t risk it. Any one of the doctors could be a Controller. We know they’ve taken EMTs, remember? Even if they aren’t, how do we explain a perfectly healthy kid’s arms and legs suddenly disappearing and being replaced by—by—”

He broke off, sucking in a breath. Squaring his shoulders, he turned to face me with solemn, ageless eyes. “We can’t risk it,” he repeated. “Humanity, the whole war, everything. You know that. If I’d died back in the tunnel—”

He broke off again, and I scrubbed angrily at my eyes.

It wasn’t fair.

It wasn’t _fair._

Sure, we’d been stupid. _I_ had been stupid. I’d let him talk me into it, even though I knew it was risky, even though I knew we didn’t have a plan. And now—

What?

What was going to happen?

“Not your fault, Marco. I’m in charge, remember?”

A joke. I needed a joke. Something to laugh about, some reason why I shouldn’t just say _fuck it_ and give up.

“This was still a success. You guys know where the pool is. For the next day or two, you know how it’s guarded. You ID’ed like six Controllers, and who knows—maybe some of them got out after us. And we have the gun.”

I looked down at the alien weapon, lying on the grass between us. It glistened wetly beneath the stars, covered in my best friend’s blood.

One mistake. We made _one_ mistake! Things shouldn’t go this wrong based on one fucking mistake!

_Come on, Marco, you know better than that. Your mom made one mistake, too. You’ve already learned this lesson._

“Besides,” Jake continued, “maybe I’ll get lucky. I mean, at least I ended up back in my own body. I could’ve panicked and gotten stuck as a bird or something. Maybe—maybe it’ll work out, you know?”

It wouldn’t. The universe just wasn’t that kind.

“Look, man, can you say something? I mean, I hate to be—whatever—but, I dunno. I just—I could use a little Marco right now.”

I looked up, feeling a lump the size of a cue ball in my throat. Jake’s smile was lopsided and cracked, his eyes full of fear.

_Say something funny, asshole!_

But I had nothing.

“I’ll—” I began, and then I broke off. Clearing my throat, I tried again. “I’ll look after Cassie. And Tom. And your parents. I’ll make sure—I’ll make _sure_ they come through this.”

Jake let out a breath, his shoulders relaxing fractionally. “I know. No better hands, man.” He looked up at the moon. “How much time do I have?”

I checked the watch we’d left in the cache of clothes. “Maybe two minutes. Maybe more. I don’t know exactly when it happened.”

“I guess I should lay down, or something. In case I faint or whatever.”

He took a few steps away from the bloodstained patch, and slowly lowered himself down to the ground, lacing his fingers together behind his head. I felt my fists clenching, felt an all-consuming anger building up inside me, threatening to tear everything apart.

_Not yet. Not until after._

I sat down beside him, crossing my legs, forcing myself to stay calm, to breathe, to run my fingers through the grass without ripping it up. I wished I had something meaningful to say to him—some secret I’d kept locked away, some apology I’d always held back.

But we didn’t have anything like that between us.

Except—

“Jake.”

“Mmm.”

“When my mom drowned.”

“Mmm?”

“I never said thanks. For—for everything.”

The grass rustled as Jake propped himself up on his elbows and looked over at me. “Which things?” he asked quietly.

“For—”

My voice hitched, and I swallowed. “For never telling me some bullshit like _sorry for your loss,_ ” I said, as steadily as I could. “For dragging me out to Six Flags on the anniversary. For laughing at all my stupid jokes. God, every one. You laughed at every single one, man. That—those laughs kept me going.”

Jake nodded, another crooked smile spreading across his face. “Yeah,” he said. “Those were some good jokes.”

_Last chance, Marco._

“Hey, Jake—what’s Helen Keller’s favorite color?”

He shrugged.

“Velcro.”

There was a heartbeat’s pause, and then Jake threw back his head and laughed—a long, rich laugh, full of light and life. “You dork,” he said. “You’re going to go to hell for that one.”

He reached over and punched my knee, and I smiled weakly. Then he lay back once more, his eyes closing as his breathing slowed.

“Jake,” I said softly.

Then again, louder. “ _Jake.”_

There was no answer.


	9. Interlude 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are enjoying this story, or have thoughts on how it could be better, or if you'd like to participate in theorizing about the plot or rational Animorphs in general, please head over to r/rational or post reviews here. I read and appreciate every word you guys are willing to offer.

**Interlude**

[PULSING PRESSURE, A VISION OF DEEP BLOODRED]

[A GOLDEN SUN, JUST ABOVE THE HORIZON, SINKING FAST]

[A CLIFF WHERE THE WORLD SEEMS TO END, LOOKING OUT OVER NOTHINGNESS]

 

…

 

[EIGHT BRIGHT LEAVES SWIRLING IN A POOL; ONE IS CAUGHT IN A CURRENT AND SWEPT ONWARD DOWN THE STREAM]

[A SEVEN-FINGERED HAND REACHING INTO A BAG AND FINDING NOTHING]

[A VAST EMPTINESS OF PURE WHITE; A BLACK MOTE OF INFINITE DENSITY]

[A STORM RAGES OUTSIDE; A CAVE, WARM AND DRY]

[A BURDEN THAT CAN NO LONGER BE BORNE; ARMS COLLAPSING IN EXHAUSTION]

[A CLOUD IN THE SKY IN THE SHAPE OF A BIRD; THE WIND BLOWS AND THE CLOUD DISAPPEARS]

 

…

 

[A WELL-TRODDEN PATH THROUGH TALL GRASS] 

[A HOME NOT SEEN FOR MANY YEARS]

[AN IMAGE OF AN ANDALITE FACE, REFLECTED IN STILL WATER]

 

…

 

[A BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL DAY OUTSIDE; A CAVE, WARM AND DRY]

[AN ALIEN BODY, WITH PALE PINK SKIN, FOUR LIMBS, AND TWO EYES FLANKING A HOOF]

[A CIRCLE OF ANDALITES, MOVING TOWARD THE SUN, LEAVING A LONE INDIVIDUAL BEHIND]

[A STRING, STRETCHING—A STRING, SNAPPED]

[A DARK SKY WITH NO STARS; AN INFINITE SADNESS]

 

…

 

[AN ENORMOUS CAVE, FILLED WITH THE FLICKERING LIGHT OF TORCHES. A CROWD OF ANDALITES, EACH WITH ALL FOUR EYES TURNED TO FACE THE WALL. A PAINTING IN SAP AND ICHOR, A BLUE SHAPE WITH SIX LIMBS AND A LONG, SINUOUS TAIL. ONE BY ONE, EACH ANDALITE PASSES; ONE BY ONE, EACH ANDALITE GOUGES THE STONE IN THE PLACE WHERE THE TAIL ENDS.]

 

 

_Translation:_

‹Warning—you are approaching the time limit. In seven minutes, energy reserves will be depleted and the Z-space alcove will decohere. You _must-should-please-truth-unity_ demorph. If you remain in your construct, you will die. You will _never_ be forgotten.›


	10. Rachel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rachel struggles with her personal demons, and again finds herself taking unilateral action.

** Chapter 09: Rachel **

Letting the blood-soaked handgun fall from my jaws, I turned in a tight circle and froze, listening.

I could hear the shouting and chaos in the distance as the escaped humans continued to struggle against the Yeerks inside the YMCA, the sounds leaking out through the door Marco had smashed off its hinges.

I could hear the lumbering of noisy human Controllers as they tromped through the woods behind the building, searching for me.

I could hear the movements of the alien demon-things, far stealthier as they worked their way from tree to tree, hardly ever touching the ground.

All of the sounds were close, confined to the ten or so acres of park just beyond the lower parking lot. I’d managed to slow them down as they came out of the door, and then I’d led them into the woods before circling back around. As far as I could tell, they’d given up the chase and were now focused on securing the area.

Settling down into a wary crouch, I considered my options.

I was well outside of the Yeerks’ search cone, deep within a maze of thorns and brambles almost fifty feet wide. If they stuck to their current pace, it would be at least five minutes before the Controllers reached the edge of it, and several more before they got close enough to notice me. They had left their lasers inside, and even taking the demons’ machete limbs into account, I was pretty sure I had plenty of time to think, demorph, and remorph. They clearly didn’t have—or weren’t using—any kind of heat-seeking or life-detecting technology, and neither the demons nor the humans could see anywhere near as well as the tiger in the thick, dark undergrowth.

What I was _supposed_ to do—obviously—was leave. Jake and Marco were both injured, and the Yeerks were in full red-alert mode. Even in the dark, I couldn’t exactly run down the street in tiger morph—common sense said I should morph to bat or snipe and head straight for the rendezvous point.

But—

With a mental movement that felt like cocking a trigger, I stopped the thought dead in its tracks. _Careful,_ I said to myself, slowly and deliberately. _That’s how you got—_

flinch

— _how we ended up in this mess in the first place._

For several long seconds, I held my mind in a state of forced quiet, thinking nothing. I listened as the Controllers continued to crash through the leaves and bushes, none of them heading my way.

_Okay, but the problem there was that you didn’t THINK. It was that you did the WRONG thing, not that you did-anything-at-all._

Another long pause. Far away, through the open door, I could hear the last of the commotion dying down as the Yeerks reestablished order in the area around the pool.

While Jake and Marco were still in danger, the right answer had been obvious—slow the Yeerks down, draw them off the trail, take out as many as I could while keeping myself alive. Simple, straightforward, and—given the power of the tiger morph—easy.

Now, though, things weren’t so clear.

I could leave, and head for the rendezvous.

I could stay, and try to re-infiltrate the pool—see how they handled the aftermath, watch them start repairs, maybe find out who was in charge of the whole thing. It would be risky, but with the door smashed wide open and the Yeerks in disarray, I had a one-of-a-kind opportunity to judge them in action.

On the other hand, there were plenty of Controllers outside for me to hunt.

I felt the tiger’s claws flex, digging into the mulch and loam next to the stolen handgun. There was blood on those claws, and on my chest, and on my face—some of it red, some of it a deep evergreen. If there had been a thousand Controllers at the start of the evening, there were now only nine hundred and ninety three.

_You should not be okay with how okay that feels._

But I _was_ okay with it—there was no point in pretending. After days of just sitting and waiting, it had felt good to finally _do_ something—to take the fight to the enemy, start paying back a little bit of the fear and pain.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew that it wasn’t going to bring back Melissa, or Cassie’s parents. I knew that the people under Yeerk control were basically innocent, and that we weren’t going to win this war by killing Controllers one at a time. But they had been pointing guns at my friends, and now—

Now they weren’t. With everything else that had backfired, snowballed, and basically gone to crap, I had at least done that part right.

_One for two, then._

I shifted carefully between the brambles, peering back toward the distant building. I could see two human Controllers silhouetted in the wrecked doorway, both armed. There was no one else in the parking lot; all the rest of the guards were either in the woods with me, or keeping order inside. Off to my right, I could hear the search teams getting closer, only a few minutes away from the edge of the briar patch.

_Time to make a decision._

I began to demorph, keeping my front right paw near the gun, ready to grab it as soon as I had a trigger finger.

_Heading for the rendezvous is your default choice. Anything else has to have benefits that outweigh the risk._

By that measure, staying in the woods to hunt Controllers was clearly the wrong move. It would make me feel better, but the risk of getting ambushed was high—and getting higher—and there was no real payoff at the end of it. A dozen Controllers, more or less, wasn’t going to make any difference in the overall war. I’d thought about trying to drag one of the demon-things off somewhere so that I could acquire it, but they were moving through the trees in trios, watching one another’s backs, and I wasn’t at all sure I could take on three of them at once.

That left trying to infiltrate the pool.

_After tonight, they’re going to quadruple their security. This might be your only chance to gather intel. And besides, they think the attack is over. I mean, they saw you and Marco both trying to escape. They’re not going to expect anybody else to—_

I cut off the thought, grimacing through half-human teeth. That was wishful thinking— _of course_ they’d be on guard against a follow-up attack. They were probably already scouring the inside of the building for any Andalites who’d stayed behind, doing checks of every Controller to make sure there weren’t any morphed impostors.

But _how_ would they scour the building? Would they have detectors? Robotic drones? Would the Controllers have to give passwords, or was there some kind of special sensor that could scan for the presence of a Yeerk inside someone’s head?

Jake had pushed for this mission—pushed hard, against Marco’s objections—because he’d recognized that we needed information. We still knew next to nothing about the Yeerks’ operation—what kinds of technology they’d brought with them, what their major targets were, how they worked together as a group. The stuff Jake and Marco had relayed to me over the past hour barely scratched the surface of what we needed to know.

And I probably _could_ get inside. I had the fly and the bat, not to mention the human woman, and it was dark in the pool area—dark enough that Jake’s lizard morph had gone unnoticed. Given the fact that half of the guards were still out in the woods, this was probably the best chance I was ever going to get.

I tried to picture Marco’s face, to imagine his response after he heard that I’d gone back into the pool. But I couldn’t pull up anything useful. He’d yell, probably, but I didn’t know what he’d yell _about._

The long, shallow gash along my flank—a gift from one of the demons—began to knit together and disappear, even as the flesh beneath it halved and halved again, my body going from over five hundred pounds down to my normal one-oh-five.

_Are you sure you’re not doing this just to make yourself feel better?_

I calmed my thoughts again, turning my attention to my body as the last traces of tiger vanished, leaving me exposed and human in the middle of the briar patch. I dropped my mind into my chest, searching for sensation—for the tightness of fear, the vibrating heat of anger, the cold pressure of fury.

I didn’t _feel_ emotional.

And we _did_ need information.

And this _was_ the right moment to try to get it.

…right?

I clenched my fists, my right hand curling tight around the grip of the handgun. This kind of double-thinking and second-guessing—it wasn’t me. I was used to trusting my instincts.

But those instincts had gotten the Withers and the Chapmans killed.

_Well, you can’t just sit here forever._

Gritting my teeth, I began to morph again, shrinking down and away from the thorns, focusing on the fly in all of its gross, tiny detail.

It wasn’t a decision—not in the sense of knowing what I was doing, of being sure or even confident. I didn’t actually know that I would be able to handle whatever was waiting for me beyond the broken door. I didn’t actually know that I was making the right choice.

There was no chance, though, that I could just walk away, having let Jake and Marco take all of the risks, pay all of the consequences. Not when this whole thing was my fault to begin with.

_Once around the pool, then out. No heroics, no unnecessary risks._

I at least _tried_ to believe it.

 

*        *        *

 

The Yeerks were most definitely not stupid.

It took me ten minutes to get past the two Controllers guarding the entrance, both of whom were wielding some kind of wide-beam ray gun and watching the doorway like hawks. I couldn’t be sure, with the fly’s insanely shattered vision, but I thought I saw them take out a dozen mosquitoes, a couple of fireflies, and at least one squirrel. In the end, I had to wait until one of them sneezed, zooming past at ground level while the other one reflexively said “Bless you.”

The interior of the building was lit by over a hundred spotlights, every surface illuminated and shadowless, with no place for a bat or a lizard to hide. There was a handful of technicians busy dismantling the wreckage of the alien archway that Marco had smashed, and another pair trying to repair the door to one of the large cages. There weren’t any scanners or robot drones, but there were plenty of regular old humans walking around, each armed with the same wide-beam burner. I stayed as high as I could, hoping to avoid notice.

Unfortunately, this meant that I couldn’t even catch the vibrations from the Controllers down below, let alone try to interpret it as speech. I spent three heart-pounding minutes changing bodies on the roof of the shed in the corner, after first circling the area four times to confirm that there were no obvious cameras and that none of the sentries circling below were climbing up to check it. The very last morph that Cassie had given me before disappearing into the mountains was a bird called a white-throated needletail. It was about the same size as a robin, with black feathers everywhere except the throat and the tail. She’d called it the cheetah of the skies, said it could fly over a hundred miles per hour in a straight line.

“It can’t hold that speed for very long,” she’d told me. “Maybe a couple of miles. I couldn’t use it when—the snipe is better, if you need to go farther than that. But if you ever need a quick getaway, this can take you from the school to the mall in about forty-five seconds.”

Even so, I’d kept an extremely low profile, forcing the bird body to flatten itself against the roof just below the peak. There was no point in taking chances, after all, and the needletail was perfectly capable of seeing and hearing at a distance.

As it turned out, though, there was almost nothing to see or hear. Nothing that didn’t match with Jake and Marco’s descriptions, anyway. Other than the repairmen and the handful of extra guards sweeping the space, the Yeerks had already returned to normal. There were only a few children remaining in the cages—it was already after nine o’clock, and the YMCA closed at ten—but there were still plenty of people, most of them wearing the kind of clothes my mom and dad wore to work.

Occasionally, one of the side doors would open briefly. The middle one seemed to be mostly for the demon-things, and the one closest to the entrance mostly for humans, although occasionally one of the demons would come in from outside and go through it—reporting, maybe? Although that didn’t make much sense, since they presumably all had communicators.

The door on the right gaped open, its frame twisted out and away from the wall where Marco had burst through. Inside was a tunnel of the deepest black, flanked by six demon guards carrying ordinary human guns. Occasionally, I thought I heard the scrape of something moving inside, but it was impossible to be sure over the sounds of sobbing and screaming.

It was those sobs and screams that kept drawing my attention. They weren’t quite what I had been expecting—the way Jake and Marco had described them, it had sounded like there would be nothing but horror and despair. And maybe there had been, forty-five minutes ago, but now there was a different quality in the chorus of voices.

Defiance.

“Fuck you!” one man was shouting, his face wild and sweaty, his suit in disarray. He was pressed up against the bars, as close to his captors as he could get, occasionally reaching through to swipe at the passing guards, or to throw up his middle fingers. “Fuck all of you, you fucking slugs! You’re going to die, every last motherfucking one of you! I’m going to pour salt into your fucking pool and _swim_ in it!”

“You can beat them!” yelled a middle-aged woman in a floral dress. Her hands were cupped to her mouth as she called across the pool to the other cages. “If you try hard enough, you can take back control! If enough of us do it, there’s no way they can keep it a secret!”

“Sam!” cried a young boy, his voice breaking. “Sam, don’t worry! It’s going to be okay! I’m here, Sam! I’m not going to leave you!”

Farther back within the cages, small groups had formed around individuals who were crying or screaming, men and women offering what comfort and solace they could. I could see a trio of teenage girls—just a few years older than me—huddled together in a corner, their expressions grim but determined as they spoke in rapid, low whispers.

Once, a man began taking off his belt—whether to use it as a tool or a weapon, I couldn’t tell—only to be stunned by one of the human guards. As his body sagged, the rest of the prisoners surged forward, spitting and hissing and throwing change. Each time the demon-things came to open the door, they had to activate some kind of force field that rooted everyone in place, and twice the people packed themselves so densely around the door that the whole group had to be stunned and heaved aside.

I had expected it to be bad.

I hadn’t expected it to give me _hope._

Still flat against the roof, I turned my head, sweeping my gaze across the five half-filled cages. I wanted with all my heart to call out to them, to offer some scrap of encouragement or support. Or better yet, to join them—to put on Elfangor’s body and carve my way through the enemy, breaking open the cages and setting every last one of them free.

 _But that already happened,_ whispered the tiny voice in the back of my head. _Marco let them out, and the Yeerks just rounded them up and put them right back in._

Balance of power—there were just too many Controllers. Twenty or thirty running the reinfestation process, another twenty or thirty sweeping the space, another twenty or thirty outside, and who knew how many lurking behind the doors or in the rest of the building.

We couldn’t win this war. Not with just me and Jake and Cassie and Marco and Tobias and the kid Jake said Tobias had recruited. Not against a thousand of them, with twenty thousand more just waiting to crawl out of the pool.

I clicked my beak and fluffed my feathers. It was time to get out of there, to catch up with Jake and Marco and start planning our next move. Staying low, I turned my attention back to the entrance, measuring the danger. There were enough Controllers between me and the door that it might make more sense to morph back to—

I paused, letting my thoughts coast to a halt as the seed of an idea blossomed in the back of my mind. I looked back at the cages, at the people still shouting their contempt. I looked at the guards, at the pattern of their movements, the spread of their formation. I counted quietly in my head, watching as a human Controller swept past the shed, her burner at the ready.

_One hundred miles per hour times about five thousand feet per mile is five hundred thousand feet per hour divided by sixty minutes in an hour is about ten thousand feet per minute divided by sixty seconds in a minute is about two hundred feet per second. Double it for the time it takes me to get up to speed, and double it again for dodging and slowing down at the door—_

Four seconds.

I could make it through, even if the Controllers were on alert. It could work.

 _NO,_ said the tiny voice, suddenly not so tiny. _Not like this. You_ know _what happened last time._

 _This is different,_ I argued, straining my ears as I trained my eyes on the farthest cage. It wasn’t easy, but I thought I could make out the voices of two of the loudest people, even from over a hundred feet away. _They’re not going to kill ALL of them._

_How do you know that?_

Slowly, carefully, I pushed myself up to my feet, standing a few inches back from the peak of the roof, resisting the urge to flap.

I _didn’t_ know that. I couldn’t, couldn’t be sure, not after what they’d done to the Chapmans, and to Cassie’s parents. But there were over a hundred people spread out between the five cages. Even if the Yeerks had doubled their presence in the week since the construction site, they couldn’t afford to lose _that_ many hosts.

Could they?

 _You can’t,_ the voice insisted.

But it was wrong. Marco couldn’t. Jake couldn’t. Cassie and Tobias couldn’t. And maybe I could learn a thing or two from them, from the rest of our ragtag little army. One week in, and my mistakes had already cost us more than I could ever repay. A part of me had been screaming _never again_ nonstop since Saturday.

But this was just the kind of crazy risk that the rest of me had been crying out for, ever since the moment Elfangor’s ship decloaked in front of us. It was all-or-nothing, win or lose, with me and a couple hundred captives balanced against maybe the whole war effort. If the needletail was fast enough, I’d be outside in minutes, and if it wasn’t—

I looked back at the first cage, at the middle finger man. He was still shouting, his voice showing no sign of giving out.

Well. At least _this_ time, the consequences would fall on the willing. On me, and my fellow warriors—the ones who refused to give up.

I waited on the roof while the guards made a few more rounds—considering the timing, practicing the words in my head. I tried to recall the huge strangeness of Elfangor’s voice, the heavy, prophetic tone.

 _Don’t do this,_ the voice whispered, one final, quiet plea.

But we needed information, and this _was_ the right moment to get it.

Flexing my wings, I pushed my thoughts out into the air, willing them into the heads of the prisoners in the cages, leaving out everyone else—the people on the piers, the Controllers, the stalking demons. I made my voice as loud as possible, forming each word with careful precision.

<HUMANS,> I bellowed, and the air fell silent. <My name is Elfangor.>

The guards paused in their rounds, unnerved by the sudden and unexplained calm.

<I fight the Yeerks,> I said. <I and my fellow Andalites. You fight them as well, and for that I honor you.>

Somewhere in the background, an alarm began to wail. The middle door opened, and a dozen of the demon guards poured out onto the floor, their heads turning in every direction. I was above them, between them and the spotlights, hidden by the glare.

<I cannot free you today,> I said. <But if you hate the Yeerks—if you would see them gone from this planet—then search your memories. You have seen their plans—they have used your bodies to carry out their foul purpose. I need information—the identity of highly placed Controllers—the locations of their major targets—any tactical detail that might allow us to strike a blow against them. You will suffer for this. Your controllers will punish you for speaking out. But if you have the knowledge I seek, shout it—shout it now! I will hear it, and I will make them _pay! >_

There was a pause, a silence like the gap between lightning and thunder, and then the voices rose once more.

I listened, my heart breaking.

I listened, and then I flew, leaving all of them behind.

 

*        *        *

 

“Marco!” I cried out, emerging from the woods. “Sorry—I stayed behind, went back into the pool. I heard—I found out—”

I broke off as Marco turned, felt all of the strength go out of my legs as I saw the tears on his face, glistening in the light of the campfire.

 

*        *        *

 

Taking in a breath, I padded closer to the flame. I could feel the tiger’s indecision, the mix of fascination and fear.

_It’s just pain. It isn’t permanent._

Slowly, hesitantly, I reached out with one giant paw, feeling the heat of the fire soak its way into my muscles. The sensation peaked, spiked, and I jerked back reflexively, the claws unsheathing themselves. Gathering my resolve, I inched closer and reached out again.

_Pain, you can handle._

Every muscle of the tiger’s five hundred pound body began to tremble as the air filled with the smell of burning flesh and hair.

_Just pain._

The heat traveled in waves up my leg—fire—followed by liquid ice—followed by white-hot lightning—followed by a horrifying nothingness as the nerves began to die.

_You are stronger than the pain._

I watched, with clinical interest.

I watched, with screaming horror.

_You can do this._

A pitiful shriek tore its way out of the tiger’s mouth, a primal expression of rage and terror that could not be suppressed. It wasn’t just the pain. It was the _damage._ It was the loss of power, of movement, of freedom and speed. It was an antelope, escaping across the plain—a charging rhino that couldn’t be dodged—a disinterested mate, loping away. It was a lesson learned again and again over a billion years of evolution—somewhere, deep within its soul, the tiger knew that this was death.

But the tiger was not in control. _I_ was in control, and I was not afraid.

Not of mere pain.

I pulled the ruined paw away from the flame, set it down on the rocky earth, forced myself to put weight on it. Waves of agony smashed into my brain, my vision darkening and narrowing as the tiger body begged me to stop, to roll over, to do _anything_ else. I took a few careful steps, and the body rebelled, threatening to collapse.

I tightened my grip.

It was getting easier. The first time, it had taken me half an hour just to get close enough to blister, and I had demorphed almost in a panic, some part of me halfway convinced that the burn would still be there on my human hand. Now, I was able to run even as the tiger screamed in protest.

I circled the clearing at a sprint, taking in the sounds and smells, returning to the campfire where Jake lay motionless inside his sleeping bag. Turning, I placed my other paws in the embers, one by one, steeling myself as the flesh burned. Bending down, I seized a red-hot coal with my jaws, held it in my mouth until it stopped sizzling.

_You deserve this._

The thought was just a whisper, but I moved to crush it immediately. This was not about guilt. Guilt would not bring Melissa back. It would not bring Cassie’s parents back. It would not undo the disaster at the pool, wake Jake from his coma. The only thing to be gained from punishing myself was absolution, and I didn’t _want_ absolution.

I wanted—

<Rachel?>

Dropping the coal, I stepped away from the fire and began to demorph. <Here,> I called out. <Give me two minutes.>

“Those were burns,” Marco said tonelessly, emerging from the forest two minutes later clad in gym shorts and a t-shirt. The smell still hung thick in the air, and there were dark footprints glistening wetly near the fire.

I shrugged. “Building up pain tolerance,” I said. “Based on what you told me about what happened in the cave, it sounds like it’s probably going to come in handy.”

Marco held my gaze for a long moment, and I prepared to defend myself— _I did a sweep, there was no one around, I can still fight on burnt paws, that’s the whole point_ —but he said nothing. Shifting, he nodded toward the sleeping bag. “Any change?” he asked.

“None,” I said. “I spent most of the afternoon dripping smoothie into him. Took forever, but I got it all in.”

“I picked up some baby wipes,” Marco said. “I didn’t get any more diapers. I figure if the box we’ve got doesn’t last…”

He trailed off, turning to gaze into the fire. “His folks are getting worried. They kept me right up to the time limit at dinner today, wanting to talk. They kept saying I wasn’t acting like myself.”

“Are they sending him—you—back to school on Monday?”

“Maybe. Right now, I’m more worried about tomorrow. They said they wanted me home by ten tonight, and I get the sense they’re thinking about taking a road trip out to the cabin, now that all the funerals are over.”

I felt my heart sink. “That’s a three hour drive, isn’t it?”

Marco nodded. “And you know Jake’s dad. No bathroom breaks. I’d have to demorph under a blanket. With Tom right there next to me.”

I looked over at my cousin, still lying exactly where I’d left him when I finished with the smoothie. His breathing was slow but shallow, the movement of the sleeping bag barely visible in the fading light.

Just like it had been two nights ago, when I’d finally arrived after escaping from the pool, five minutes too late to say goodbye.

_Stop it. Don’t you dare._

“Then we take him to a hospital ourselves. You can leave a note or something, saying he ran away.”

Marco shook his head. “First thing they’ll do is just bring him back. St. Mary’s has the best neurological department in the state. I checked last night.”

It also had over four hundred doctors, nurses, technicians, and analysts, of which nearly half were Controllers. According to the prisoners, the Yeerks were planning to use the hospital for a major infestation push that would start in a little over a week. It was the third most disturbing piece of information I’d managed to fly away with.

_Of course, there’s nothing to stop them from starting the push sooner, now that they think the Andalites are watching._

Or would they do something completely different instead, now that their plan was compromised?

I wasn’t sure. Figuring out that kind of stuff was Jake’s specialty, not mine.

“So we fall back to plan B,” I said brusquely, refusing to let my voice waver. “We tell his parents the truth, get them to take him somewhere out of state.”

Marco didn’t even shake his head this time, just slumped a little further as he stared into the fire. “Can’t,” he said dully. “They either listen, or they don’t, and either way—”

He sighed, as if too tired to finish the thought. “Trust me, it doesn’t work out.”

I waited, but he said nothing more. After a dozen heartbeats I began to pace back and forth, kicking at the rocks and leaves that were scattered across the little clearing.

_Either way—_

_Trust me—_

_You wouldn’t understand if I explained it to you, Rachel, so I’m not going to bother._

For the hundredth time, I found myself fighting back against my brain, against the sneaking, slithering, corrosive despair it kept trying to push into my thoughts. Marco was just tired. Tired and burnt-out and grieving—it had nothing to do with me.

Still, though, I _did_ want to understand. Gritting my teeth, I pulled my mind away from its defeatist monologue and forced it to focus.

 _They either listen, or they don’t_ —Jake’s parents would either believe us, believe in the threat, or they would think we’d gone crazy and try to get us locked up.

But that didn’t make any sense, because we could morph right in front of them. There’s no way they wouldn’t believe us after _that—_ Marco must have meant something else.

What else would they not believe us about?

 _The Yeerks? I mean, morphing doesn’t prove_ that.

…and if they didn’t buy into the threat of the Yeerks, or even if they just underestimated it a little…

They could try to go public. Here, in town—which would get them killed or taken—or elsewhere, which would either get them locked up or maybe actually _work_ , in which case the Yeerks might give up on their slow infiltration and just glass half the planet…

 _And if they_ did _listen?_

Oh. Right.

“You think they’d pull us out of the fight?”

“No, I think they’ll be totally cool with letting a couple of teenagers who can’t even drive repeatedly risk their lives in mortal combat with brainsucking aliens. I mean, hey, it’s the twenty-first century, right? Kids gotta learn sometime.”

There was no humor in Marco’s voice, no spark of laughter or happiness. He said the words as if he were reading off of a script—as if he didn’t have the energy to come up with something real, and was falling back on sarcasm by default.

I knew how he felt. It’s why I was angry, after all.

“We have to do _something,”_ I bit off, trying to keep my words level. “We don’t know how to take care of a coma patient. If he doesn’t wake up soon, and we don’t get help, he’s going to _die_ out here.”

_“He’s already fucking dead!”_

I blinked at the unexpected outburst, blinked and almost missed Marco leaping to his feet, his face wrenched in anguish, sudden tension tightening every muscle. He closed the distance between us in a flash, thrust a finger into my face, seeming six inches taller than he really was. “He died two _days_ ago! You just don’t want to fucking _admit_ it! Whatever alien dimension his body was in, it’s _gone,_ okay? _He’s_ gone. And _that_ thing—that fucking _body_ over there—just because it doesn’t know it’s supposed to stop _breathing_ —”

For a moment, I thought he was going to hit me, hit Jake, lose all control and just start tearing things apart. He raised his hands, his fingers curled like claws, and let out a wordless cry of anger and frustration. Then he spun on his heel, walked straight to the nearest tree, and punched it—hard.

I heard the _crack_ of something breaking, stood there stunned and speechless as I waited for Marco to yell again.

But he said nothing. Not a word, not a whimper. He just stood there, looking down at his knuckles, his shoulders heaving silently.

Yes, I knew how he felt.

_This is your fault, too._

“I’m not giving up,” I said finally, after a full minute of silence. “Not on Jake, and not on the war. We know what they’re up to, now. We can figure out a way to stop them. And in the meantime—as long as you’re breathing, there’s hope.”

_Thanks, Mother Theresa._

That’s what Marco should have said. Instead, he just slumped again, leaning against the tree, his face pressed into the rough bark, his eyes brimming with tears.

I wanted to join him. To let go, and grieve—to start dealing with the fact that I didn’t really know if my cousin would ever wake up again.

But I couldn’t.

I had work to do.

 

*        *        *

 

The bell rang, and the room filled with the sounds of binders snapping and zippers zipping, the shriekscrape of chairs on linoleum. Swinging my bookbag onto my shoulder, I followed the crowd out into the hall.

It was Monday, the second day of school since the Chapmans’ car accident, and my first day back since Elfangor. I walked through the hallways on autopilot, surrounded by a bubble of silent, awkward sympathy. Nobody knew quite how they were supposed to deal with me, so instead, they simply didn’t.

I didn’t mind. It made it easier to slip away unnoticed to morph.

So far, I’d skipped two of my seven classes, stashing my clothes in a Ziploc bag in the tank of the toilet in the girls’ bathroom each time. US History had been spent skittering through the ceiling in the lizard morph, while PE had given me a chance to eavesdrop on the teacher’s lounge for almost an hour.

Neither excursion had turned up any new information. If the prisoners in the Yeerk pool were to be believed, every single faculty member was now a Controller, and there were plans to take the whole student body in the very near future. Yet even in private, their conversations were mundane and boring and depressingly human. Mr. Plumblee, the AP Biology teacher, was going to have to cancel his vacation so his wife could visit her father, who was going through some kind of surgery. Mrs. Tilman, who taught Spanish and French, was trying to talk the rest of the staff into un-cancelling their surprise birthday party for Ms. Vickers, because it wasn’t _her_ fault that people got into car accidents. Three teachers I didn’t know from the math department spent almost twenty minutes shipping various combinations of their students, before getting sidetracked on how awful the new state standardized tests were going to be.

Just once, while peering through a vent at our principal, Mr. Krouse, I thought I heard the word “Visser.” He was talking on the phone, his voice low and serious, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and I didn’t want to risk crawling out of the vent to get closer.

If they _were_ all Controllers, they were keeping up the act—probably to prevent the very thing that I was trying to do. After the second round of spying, I’d given up and morphed back into my self-copy, resigned to a regular day of school.

Or as regular as possible, anyway. It was lunchtime now, and I headed for the cafeteria, dropping my stuff off in my locker and dodging the compassionate stares of my classmates. I sat in the corner, eating quietly, and my presence was like a force field, keeping the space around me empty for three seats in every direction.

How many of them had already been taken? I looked out across the tables, at the mix of conversation, only a little more subdued than usual. It was hard to believe that _any_ of them had an alien slug lurking behind their eyes.

But Melissa had. For days, maybe weeks. And I hadn’t noticed.

_They could be doing their big push right now. How would you even know? Maybe it happened during PE. You walk into the locker room, they zap you, you come out a Controller. You could already be one of the very last ones._

I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. It was true, but it wasn’t useful. According to the prisoners, I had at least until Friday, and even if they’d pushed up their timetable, they weren’t likely to be making their move _today._ I needed to stay focused on things I had the ability to _do_ something about—worrying about nightmare scenarios only helped if it led to some kind of action.

Raising my cheeseburger to my mouth, I took a bite just as someone slid into the seat right next to me. I turned to look and saw Erek King, the retired dog trainer’s kid. Mouth full, I simply raised an eyebrow in greeting, chewing as fast as I could.

Erek nodded back. “Hello, Elfangor,” he said softly.

 

*        *        *

 

Time stopped.

I sprang to my feet, barely stopping myself from choking as I swallowed the entire mouthful half-chewed. Around me, the rest of the cafeteria had frozen in place, all laughter and conversation cut off as if a switch had been flipped.

“Wait!” said Erek, and rounding on him, I saw that he had disappeared, replaced by a gleaming, chrome-and-ivory robot with six limbs and no head, just a little bit smaller than me and very obviously alien.

I tried to jump backward, out and away from the table, and found myself caught as if I’d come up against a vertical wall of glue.

“Don’t panic! I won’t hurt you!”

“Let me out,” I growled. “Let me go _right now,_ or we’ll see who hurts who.” I was already poised on the edge of morphing, my brain flickering between gorilla, elephant, and rhino. The robot looked tough, but not two-tons tough.

“I can’t,” it said, its voice still distinctly that of a teenage boy.

“ _Now,”_ I barked, my fists clenching as my heartrate continued to rise.

“I _can’t,”_ it repeated. “If I let you out now, it’s likely you’ll hurt yourself or someone else. I literally can’t let that happen.”

My brain began catching up with my body, and my eyes darted around, taking in the frozen tableau. “What did you— _how_ did you—”

 _How did you stop time?_ I wanted to say. I suddenly felt very stupid for having tried to threaten the robot ten seconds earlier.

“I didn’t,” it said simply. “You’re inside a holographic force field. Everything’s normal outside it. As far as anyone else can see, the two of us are just sitting next to each other, talking.” Some movable parts near the top of the robot shifted, giving the impression of a frown. “Couldn’t you—can’t you tell? Our sources told us that Andalites are familiar with this kind of technology.”

I took several deep breaths, my nostrils flaring as I struggled to get myself under control. “What’s an Andalite?” I said lamely, trying to stall for time.

The robotic frown deepened. “The odds of that being a genuine question are low,” it said. “Maybe one-in-forty-six-thousand-six-hundred-fifty-six low. I can _see_ the energy from the Z-space interlink lighting up that skull you’re wearing.”

I tried to pull free of whatever was holding me, found that I could move inches but not feet. A part of me was following up on what the robot had just said— _morphing gives off detectable energy? Do the Yeerks_ know?—while the rest of me scrabbled uselessly for something intelligent to say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Please,” the robot answered back, a note of pleading entering its voice. “Trust me. I’m incapable of harming you, even if I wanted to, and I _don’t._ You’re resisting the Yeerks. We heard your voice in the pool on Wednesday. We’ve been trying to find you ever since.”

They had _heard_ me?

The robot tilted its top section, and a piece of ivory plating slid back, revealing a compartment containing a thick, gray slug, suspended amid hundreds of delicate wires.

If I hadn’t already been glued to the air, I would have jumped three feet in shock. “You’re a _Controller?”_ I blurted out.

_So much for pretending to be clueless._

“No,” the robot answered. “I hold the Yeerk in stasis, drawing on its knowledge. When it’s time to release it into the pool, I adjust its memory so that it _thinks_ it’s been controlling me.” It paused, and somehow its body language conveyed the sense of someone mustering courage. “I’m sharing this information with you in the spirit of compromise. Now you know who I am—you know my public identity. If you wanted, you could call your companion to come and destroy me. Can we _please_ talk calmly for a bit? As allies?”

My heart was still hammering away inside my chest, but some of the adrenaline had leaked back out of my bloodstream, and I could feel my panic slowly ebbing. “Let me go,” I said slowly, my voice still slightly shaky. “Let me sit down, and let me see what’s going on around me. If you do that, I’ll stay and talk.”

“Deal.”

I felt the pressure around me ease and vanish, and I slid back into my seat, pressing my sweaty palms against the smooth, cool surface of the table. Around me, the frozen cafeteria suddenly snapped into motion, a wall of sound washing away the temporary quiet. I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, feeling my shoulders relax—until I realized that this could just as easily be another hologram.

“They can see us, but they can’t hear us,” the robot said. “I’m projecting an image of us talking about the human girl’s friends, Cassie and Melissa. Speaking of which—”

It straightened noticeably, its movable facelike parts rearranging into something resembling seriousness. “What did you do with the girl whose form you’ve taken? Did you harm her? Is she somewhere safe?”

I blinked, my mind racing as I struggled to assemble an appropriate answer. _This whole thing could be a Yeerk trap,_ a part of me whispered. _It doesn’t_ feel _like one, but a smart trap_ wouldn’t.

“She’s safe,” I said finally. “We offered her protection in exchange for information and the use of her body.”

It wasn’t the best phrasing I could have come up with, but the robot didn’t seem to notice the double entendre. It simply nodded, its limbs relaxing with a gentle _whirr._ “Good,” it said. “You’ll produce her, at some point? So we can confirm?”

“I don’t see why I should,” I shot back. “If this is a—”

“It’s not a trap.”

“So you say. And I say the girl—Rachel—she’s fine.”

The robot held very still for a fraction of a second. “Fair enough,” it said, still sounding perfectly human. When it spoke again, its tone was distinctly dry and bitter. “I’ll note that if you _have_ hurt her, you’re probably better off lying to me about it.”

I frowned, opening my mouth to ask—

Something in my brain clicked, and I closed my mouth again. _Incapable of harming you, even if I wanted to._ “You have some kind of block against violence?” I asked.

“Unfortunately.” The robot turned away and sort of fidgeted, its body language signaling frustration loud and clear. “We can’t take any positive action that results in harm to a sapient being, and we’re sometimes _compelled_ to act if violence seems imminent. There’s a limit to how far ahead that chains—we don’t have to worry about low-probability consequences that are weeks in the future—but anything directly intentional or even just relatively likely is completely off the table.”

“Who’s we?” I asked.

“We are the Chee,” it said simply. “The last remaining legacy of an ancient, peace-loving species—the Pemalites, who designed and built us. We came to this planet thirteen million, five hundred fourteen thousand, one hundred and seven days ago, at the end of the Howler war, and settled here on the orders of the last surviving Pemalite.”

“How many of you are there?”

The robot fixed me with a look. “How many of _you_ are there?”

I hesitated, but only for a moment. “Six,” I said honestly, noting a tiny shift in the robot’s posture as I spoke. “Maybe seven, if we can recover one of our comrades, who crashed in the—who crashed somewhere else.”

“There are one hundred thirty-nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-one Chee, including the One Who Is Remembered.”

I could hear the capitals as he spoke, and I filed the obvious question away for later. “How many of you are fake Controllers?”

“Very few. We’re scattered across the planet, in groups of six or twelve or at most eighteen, and the Yeerks have yet to spread beyond this city. More of us are gathering—slowly, so as to avoid suspicion—although it’s not yet clear whether anything will come of it.”

My head was spinning, trying to make all of the numbers mean something. “What—” I began, and then I faltered. Taking a breath, I tried again. “Why have you—I mean, why are you telling me this? Showing yourself to me?”

“Because you resist the Yeerks. Because everything we know of them tells us that they must be stopped. Until now, we’d thought that we would have to rely on human strength, human ingenuity. We watched the battle ten days ago, and we saw the Andalite dome ship fall into the sea. We assumed that no more help was coming, until we heard your voice in the pool.”

“I didn’t see you in the cages.”

“If one of us sees something, the rest of us can remember it, unless there’s a reason to forget. And I _might_ have been in the cage—like yours, my outward form is a deception.” There was a flicker, and suddenly the robot vanished, replaced by the familiar face of Erek King, which them smoothly aged until it appeared to be seventy, and then morphed into my own. “I can take on a lot of different shapes, though for the sake of reasonable caution I usually stay within my established identity.”

I scrubbed at my eyes, trying to think. I had the feeling that there were a hundred questions I should be asking, a hundred things that Jake or Marco or even Tobias would identify as crucially important.

But that wasn’t the way my brain worked. I couldn’t just think my way into being smarter, or more perceptive.

“You want to—to form some kind of alliance?”

“Yes.”

I looked around the cafeteria, at the other students sitting and eating and laughing. Lunch was short; it would be ending in fifteen more minutes. “This isn’t the time or the place,” I said slowly. I couldn’t _quite_ keep the reluctance out of my tone—the part of me that hadn’t learned anything over the past week wanted to charge ahead at full speed. “And I can’t make this sort of decision alone. I think the answer is probably yes, but—can you meet me at”—I hesitated—“at the playground at Magnuson park? Tonight, after dark?”

The image of Erek King frowned. “Time’s pretty short, after what happened at the pool,” he said, his voice sounding somehow less formal now that it was coming out of a human mouth. “I think everything the Yeerks were planning for next week is going to happen in the next couple of days instead. There’s a chance that even a few hours might make a difference. Is this something you and your companion could decide together?”

“Probably,” I answered, “but I’m not going to see him until after school anyway.”

Erek went suddenly stiff, his eyes widening, muscles seeming to tense beneath his holographic skin. “Um,” he said, sounding more human than ever. “Um. I don’t understand. Is the other Andalite not a part of your group?”

I felt my own eyes narrow as my heartrate spiked once again. “What other Andalite?”

He pointed openly, and I almost shouted before remembering that we were both safely hidden behind a hologram. I followed the line of his finger to a boy I didn’t know, sitting alone near the middle of the cafeteria.

“That one, there,” Erek said. “He’s got the same kind of radiation signature as you. It’s different, like a fingerprint—that’s how I knew you were the one we saw at the pool. But that’s not a real human.”

I don’t know if it was the adrenaline, or the fear, or the practice I’d been putting in over the past week as I tried to learn from my mistakes. It might have just been a chance flash of insight, a lucky intuition. But for a moment, I felt like Marco as all of the pieces clicked into place at once.

We’d guessed that there might be Andalite bandits, other survivors from the crash. If there were, it was only natural that they’d make their way to this city—to the center of the Yeerk operation.

But the odds of one being _here_ , in the middle of my school cafeteria—

Zero, or close enough that it made no difference.

_They know. First Melissa, then Cassie—I’m the obvious next person to investigate._

As I watched, I thought I saw the boy’s eyes linger on us for just a moment, as if he were trying to keep an eye on us, and also trying not to be obvious about it. Even though I _knew_ we couldn’t be seen, I felt a wash of cold that ran from my spine all the way down to my fingers and toes.

“Erek,” I said. “That force field you used to hold me in place. Will it stop a laser beam?”

“Yes. But if you’re thinking of doing something violent—”

“Not me,” I interrupted. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice was whispering, running down a list that was starting to become all too familiar—gorilla, rhino, elephant, tiger. “I think that boy over there is Visser Three.”


	11. Cassie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stuck in exile, Cassie struggles with PTSD and tries to keep herself busy.

**Chapter 10: Cassie**

On Wednesday, the voice of Elfangor’s brother fell silent.

I was in the small cave I’d discovered in my first day, among the shattered boulders of a steep hillside deep within the forest. It was twenty miles from the nearest human structure—almost forty, by road—but I still did a sweep of the entire area in osprey morph and stayed as far back into the darkness as I could manage. In the three days since I’d left the others, I’d seen almost a dozen hikers on the nearby trails, and a handful going cross-country. I didn’t want to have to think about what would happen if one of them spotted an alien—or worse, caught me mid-morph—so I always made sure there was no one nearby.

I’d been checking the distress beacon each day, at sunrise and sunset. It was almost comforting, a way to stay connected to the others while I waited up in the woods. Officially, I was supposed to be finding or building some kind of base camp—a place where the others might live if their cover was blown, or where we might bring my parents once we captured them and starved the Yeerks out of their heads.

But I didn’t really know anything about camping or construction or survival skills. My dad took us out into the woods all the time, but for him it was more about being _with_ nature, and not so much about living _in_ it. We always brought tents, lighters, prepackaged food—I knew a little bit about how to find paths, and which roots and mushrooms were good to eat, but I’d spent a lot more time identifying bird species than rubbing sticks together.

I’d spent an hour in grizzly morph in that first afternoon, digging the rotting muck out of the cave and bringing in pine boughs to make a kind of floor, but after that I’d run out of ideas. So I’d simply kept morphing, dipping in and out of the amazing range of bodies at my disposal, wandering the forest as a wolf, as a gorilla, as a mouse. I slithered my way up to the treetops in the body of a Burmese python, glided back down on the winglike membranes of a flying squirrel, dug through the riverbanks with the paws of a star-nosed mole, and defied the rushing currents with the reckless speed of an otter.

A part of me knew I was hiding. Running away from the pain, hoping not to think about it. I hadn’t morphed into the snipe or the elephant since passing them on to the others—it was too easy, wearing those bodies, to remember every detail of Sunday night, to hear the crack of my mother’s shin and see the blank emotionlessness of my father’s Controlled face.

Maybe that makes me a coward. The part of me that spoke in Rachel’s voice certainly thought so. Each minute I spent riding the thermals or galloping through the meadows was a minute my parents were spending locked inside their own brains, unable to escape. Each rush of euphoria was a betrayal, and the guilt of each morph made the next one more inevitable as I spiraled downward, orbiting a black hole I couldn’t bear to look at.

It was my fault. But what good did it do to sit around obsessing over it? Jake and the others had banished me—sent me to the woods where I wouldn’t be in the way, wouldn’t be a risk, wouldn’t be putting everyone else in danger. There was literally nothing I could do except practice morphing.

So I did. And each day, twice a day, I returned to the cave. To Elfangor’s body, and to the reminder that I was not the only one alone and waiting.

I hadn’t realized just how much I’d started to lean on that reminder—how much I _needed_ the voice of Elfangor’s brother to be there. Its sudden absence hit me like a physical blow—as the seconds stretched out in silence, I felt the strength drain from my Andalite limbs, felt my tail drooping as I dropped down to all sixes.

_Elfangor. Brother. Help me._

I whispered the words in my own head, a pale imitation.

_Maybe—maybe they came to rescue him. Other survivors, or another Andalite ship._

Or maybe he’d escaped on his own—figured out a way off whatever island or out of whatever deep ocean trench he’d ended up in. He was an Andalite warrior, after all. He had morphing power—thought-speak—advanced weapons I probably couldn’t even imagine.

But then again, so did the Yeerks. Visser Three, the monster at the heart of the nightmare, the one that had torn Elfangor apart right in front of us.

I’d spent almost as much effort trying not to think about _that_ memory. The way the Visser’s body had—had _unfolded,_ bloodblack plates of armor sliding forth from his chest like a flower blossoming in time-lapse. The way even his own minions had hesitated, had shuffled back, nervously fingering their guns. The spray of mist that I thought I’d seen, hovering against the night sky for just a split second after the jaws snapped shut—

I had felt the raw power of the Andalite brain, tapped into it the same way I tapped into the elephant’s hearing or the wolf’s sense of smell. It was like being plugged into a computer—in Elfangor’s body, I could follow three lines of thought at once, multiply four-digit numbers together in a second, track everything that was going on around me with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. For brief stretches of time, I could play at being a genius.

The Visser _was_ a genius. There hadn’t been time for a long history lesson, in those few brief minutes on the bridge of Elfangor’s ruined ship. But there had been enough time for him to tell us about Alloran—about the changes the war-prince had been making to the Andalite military, the brilliance of his tactical theory. How he’d spurred a renaissance of curiosity and exploration, drawing an entire generation into space. How his insight had led to Seerow’s breakthrough and the development of morphing technology. How, even after his Fall, the doctrines he’d left behind had guided the Andalite fleet to victory in the battle over Gara—though only, Elfangor said, because the Visser himself had not been present.

Taking Alloran had been the opening move of the war, the Yeerks’ first and most successful gambit. Every triumph they’d had since then had hinged upon his aptitude for war. If Elfangor’s brother was dead—and what else could his sudden silence mean?—the odds were that Visser Three was the reason why.

And it was Visser Three that we had to beat, if I wanted to get my parents back.

I could sense myself slipping into despair, into the sick, overwhelmed fog that had hung over me since Sunday night. The war was just so _big_ —even now, when it had only just begun. The Yeerks had a thousand slaves already, and I didn’t even know how to make a campfire without my dad’s help. Visser Three was an _actual evil villain_ , and I hadn’t even had the presence of mind to knock my mother unconscious.

If I had, my dad might have been there with me.

I wondered if the Yeerk inside him was letting him take care of the animals—if the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic was important enough to keep going, as cover.

_Stop it. Stop this. Stop moping around and DO something, Cassie!_

Taking in a deep breath through the Andalite’s folded nostrils, I tried to gather my resolve, to lend weight to the part of me that was burning to set my parents free instead of the part that said it was all already over. But no matter how small that second voice shrank, I could never _quite_ get it to go away.

Wearily, I pressed myself back up off the floor of the cave, my tail lashing as it counterbalanced my heavy torso, keeping me from toppling forward. I clenched Elfangor’s seven-fingered fists, looking down at them with the super-3D vision that came along with having four eyes. Below me, my hooves smelled/tasted the acrid needles of the pine boughs, took an experimental bite and closed in disgust.

 _Good night, brother,_ I whispered silently.

On a sudden impulse, I reached out with my tail blade, tapped it gently against the stone of the cave wall. It made a small sound, like hitting two sticks together. I struck a little harder, leaving a scratch mark, and then harder still, watching tiny flecks of rock scatter into the darkness.

With a few swift, sure strokes, I carved a pair of figures into the wall—four legs, two arms, furred four-eyed bodies and long, sinuous tails. Behind them, I traced a simple, bare horizon and a single shining sun.

It wasn’t enough, for a warrior who had given his life to buy us time. It wasn’t enough for his living, breathing brother, who’d crossed half a galaxy only to spend his last few days in lonely despair. I had no idea how Andalites remembered their dead, no idea what sort of words I should say.

But it was all I could think of, so I turned away and demorphed.

 

*        *        *

 

Focusing my thoughts, I applied a little pressure—felt my thoughts slide—felt the corresponding mental _click_ —and watched from within as the red-tailed hawk came to life. It sprang from the ground, flapping powerfully in the cool morning air, taking us up into the trees where it perched near the top of a pine, looking out over the crystal blue lake.

I would never, ever, _ever_ get bored of flying. Even in the midst of my despair, the feeling of air beneath my wings, the sky stretched all around me and the earth so green and alive below—

Like clockwork, the guilt kicked in, and I hunched and ruffled my feathers, my body spasming slightly as my instructions conflicted with those of the hawk brain.

During the first few days, I’d spent a lot of time trying to disappear—to vanish inside the morphs, really _become_ a horse or a bear or a raccoon or an owl. It had seemed like a better option than going around in endless circles inside my own head.

But I’d found that it wasn’t that easy. The animal brain seemed to be there, under the surface, but it didn’t have freedom of movement. There were controls, safeguards, blocks—I could tap into the hawk’s instincts and experiences for things like knowing how to bank and soar, but I couldn’t just _not_ be in control. Even when the instincts took over—like with Tobias and the mouse—there was still some level at which the body needed me to provide it with energy. It was like I was the battery, and without my participation, the system wouldn’t run. I could stand there all day thinking _go on, do your thing_ and it would have no more effect than trying to raise my arm by _telling_ it to.

After hours of fruitless straining, though, I’d discovered a workaround—a kind of mental switch that unlocked the controls, letting the animal mind take over. It was like the morphing equivalent of an autopilot—I could still see and hear, could resume control in an instant, but in the meantime the body would run itself, without any need for input from me.

Which was good, because _I_ had no idea how to hunt for squirrels.

Taking off once more, the hawk body began to circle, rising and rising on a column of hot air as the morning sun began to warm the forest. I could sense its attention darting around, feel its eyes—our eyes—tracking each tiny movement in the landscape below, our wings responding to changes in the breeze with shifts as subtle as moving a single feather.

There was a meadow about a mile from the cave, a few minutes’ flight north of the lake. The red-tail liked to hunt there, waiting in the trees around the perimeter as it considered its next move. Reaching the peak of its spiral, it turned its beak toward the grassy patch and began to glide, angling effortlessly through the air.

Since discovering the autopilot switch, I’d been wondering about other aspects of the morphing technology. In the car, with my mother, I had managed to control the shape and speed of the transformation, which seemed to imply that there might be other controls or settings or options that we could access. There would be a lot of power in being able to do partial morphs—or combined ones—or in being able to fiddle with the acquiring process.

If I acquired two different squirrels, and visualized something that looked like a mix between them, what would happen?

For that matter, what if I could control which genes the morphing technology was choosing to flip? I’d read articles about paleobiologists who were trying to create a dinosaur by interfering with the development of ordinary chicken embryos.

There was a part of me that very much wanted to be wearing the body of a Tyrannosaurus Rex the next time I encountered Visser Three.

Arriving at the meadow, I watched as the hawk folded our wings and plunged us toward the treetops, flaring at the last second and coming in to perch on a thin branch a hundred feet off the ground. There was another hawk at the opposite end of the meadow—its individual feathers as sharp in my vision as if I was looking at them through a magnifying glass—but it made no move to defend its territory. There was plenty of prey for everyone, rabbits and mice and squirrels and voles, and what looked like twenty or thirty chipmunks.

Over the past few days, I’d managed to add one of each to my repertoire of morphs, catching them and holding them down as I returned to my human body. Now, it was time to find a duplicate.

The red-tail fluffed my/its feathers, shifting its/our weight on the branch as it/we settled into a more comfortable position. Hunting was a long, uncertain process, almost entirely made up of watching and waiting. There were patterns in the movements of the creatures below, and the hawk brain needed to know which way its prey would dart before it made its move.

I still wasn’t sure how I felt about using the hawk morph just to acquire other creatures. I had no problem with hunting—I wanted to be a zoologist if I couldn’t be a vet—but I wasn’t _eating_ the animals, just holding them down so I could borrow their DNA. Somehow, that made it worse—three of them had been pretty badly hurt in the process, and one had died before I’d fully demorphed. I’d acquired it anyway, just to see, and was slightly disturbed when it worked just fine.

But the only other way to catch them was with traps, and while I _thought_ I could build a snare, I had nothing to use as bait except the berries and crickets that were already available everywhere.

So hawk it was. I let my own consciousness recede, sinking deeper into the experience as the animal mind continued to observe. Part of the beauty of the autopilot was that I no longer had to be fully human for twenty-four hours a day—no longer had to think or plan or remember. It was easy, inside an animal’s body, to dodge thoughts of my parents, or of Visser Three, or of Jake…

Long minutes passed. The sun crawled across the sky, occasionally dipping behind the clouds. At the other end of the meadow, the other hawk tried for a rabbit, failed, and flapped dispiritedly back up to its perch.

My own hawk brain had zeroed in on one of the chipmunks, an older, fatter male with one eye missing. It was jumpy and suspicious, always turning and turning, but there was something wrong with one of its legs. It was just a hair slower than all the rest, with a noticeable bias toward dodging to the left.

Silently, gracefully, we took to the air, moving in a tight spiral, once more allowing the thermals to lift ourselves higher and higher. Two hundred feet—five hundred—nearly a thousand feet up, and the chipmunk was still as clear in my sight as if it had been in arms’ reach.

My human brain resurfaced just long enough to note that rollercoasters would never be the same, and then we were diving, the hawk body tight and streamlined as we arrowed toward the ground. Our target moved a couple of inches, oblivious, and the hawk adjusted effortlessly, changing course in the space of an instant. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice began to count—three—two— _one—_

At the last, the _very last_ moment, the hawk spread our wings, dropping almost instantly from a hundred miles per hour to something like twenty or thirty. It raked our claws forward, our eyes still locked onto the chipmunk—

Success. Seizing control, I felt my talons dig into the dirt, the tiny mammal caught between them, pinned to the ground. I suppressed the urge to squeeze, the predator’s killer instinct, and immediately began to demorph.

The other chipmunk I had pinned—two days earlier—had been the one to die. She’d been a female, her markings lighter, with fewer stripes around her face. She’d been younger, too, probably only a year old. I’d accidentally broken her spine in the dive.

I had used a couple of sticks to dig a shallow grave, unwilling to leave her lying in the field for other birds, even though I knew the foxes and the raccoons would dig her up as soon as night fell.

This one, though—it would live, as soon as I finished acquiring it and let it go. As my feathers melted and ran together, becoming skin, I reached down under my foot and gripped it, tightly. It struggled madly, scratching and squeaking until I finished demorphing and the acquiring hypnosis took hold.

Staying crouched in the dirt—I still wasn’t comfortable being naked outdoors, even though I knew there was no one around for miles—I began to concentrate, holding the images of both chipmunks in my mind. A blend of the two of them would be sandy brown with six stripes, maybe three ounces and two years old, with white around its eyes…

I felt the changes begin. Fighting the urge to celebrate, I continued to focus—for all I knew, the morphing tech was simply defaulting to one chipmunk or the other. I would have to figure out some way to confirm the difference from the inside—if I ended up young and male, for instance, or old and female.

It took another minute for the morph to finish—and several long seconds to be certain—but in the end, I was convinced. My body was young, male, and thin, with markings on its paws that didn’t match either of the animals I had originally acquired.

 _So,_ I thought to myself. _I guess it’s that easy._

Or at least, it was that easy to get _one_ combination. I would have to play around a lot more to see if I could control the mixture of traits, or to find out whether it was possible to combine DNA from multiple species.

But still. Even if the process was automatic, and couldn’t be adjusted, I’d just unlocked a whole new world of human disguises. I would be able to wear grown-up faces without putting real grown-ups at risk. That, coupled with the autopilot and my ability to control the morphing process—

It might not be enough. But it no longer felt like nothing.

 

*        *        *

 

I hadn’t slept in six days.

I’d been continuing to push the boundaries of the morphing power, acquiring more and more animals for experimentation. I hadn’t yet cracked cross-species morphing, but I _had_ managed to change the fur pattern of a single, specific fox just by concentrating very hard, and been able to remorph it again _without_ extra effort. I’d also finally figured out how to morph clothing—I couldn’t morph into something with clothes, obviously, but I could morph my own clothes _away_ , and they returned with the rest of my body when I came back.

Whenever I wasn’t experimenting, I was exploring, learning the ins and outs of the landscape in a dozen different bodies. I had stopped wandering aimlessly and begun moving in a pattern, and I’d covered almost four hundred miles traveling practically nonstop, day and night.

At first, I’d thought I was just sort of manic—charged-up from the stress, from the constant circling of my thoughts as I swung back and forth between determination and despair. After a few days, I had turned not-thinking-about-it into an art form.

By the time the weekend rolled around, though, it was clear that there was something else going on. Not only had I not slept, I wasn’t even _tired._ And it had been Thursday when I’d last had something to eat or drink.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew the answer. To test it, I flew back to the cave and demorphed back to human for an evening—the first time I’d spent more than a few minutes in my own body in over a week. Sure enough, after a few hours of huddling inside my sleeping bag, hunger and exhaustion began to set in.

 _Your true body remains unchanged—sent elsewhere, its processes suspended._ That’s what Elfangor had said, when he’d explained the morphing technology to us. He’d also said it was all a lie, whatever that meant.

But in six days, I’d spent only a couple of hours in my own body, and as far as I could tell, a couple of hours was all that my body had _experienced._ It hadn’t gotten tired, hadn’t gotten hungry, hadn’t needed to pee—not until I stopped morphing.

I tried another test, hyperventilating until my blood was saturated with oxygen and then holding my breath and counting. With effort, I could manage a little over two minutes.

I did it again and began to morph, returning to the body of the osprey. It was a fishing bird, able to dive underwater, which meant that it, too, knew how to hold its breath. I made it all the way through the change before inhaling, and spent a few minutes scoping out the area in the predawn light before returning to the open patch of mulch and leaves outside the cave.

Taking in several quick, shallow avian breaths, I began to demorph.

As the change passed through my chest, I could _feel_ my lungs returning, feel the tight, urgent pressure awaken in the back of my mind. I counted to forty-seven before I had to start breathing again, and I started by letting air _out—_ far more than I could have held in the bird’s tiny chest.

_Okay. So the stasis thing is true._

That meant—

It meant—

What did it mean?

There were questions that Marco would ask, or angles that Jake or Rachel would see—clever tricks and surprising connections. I could probably see them myself, if I thought it through carefully enough.

_Okay. You can hold your breath. That means you might be able to demorph and remorph entirely underwater, with the right kind of preparation._

And I’d already discovered that I could go basically forever without sleep or food, as long as I could keep morphing. If I hurt myself, I could probably morph into some other body long enough to get to a hospital. And if I kept going the way that I had been, I’d start aging more slowly—I’d already lost almost a week by spending so much time in morph. And—

And—

My breath caught in my throat, a shiver running down my spine.

_Wait—what—when I morph, what’s—_

I had a hard time finishing the thought.

_When I morph, what’s doing the thinking?_

I swallowed painfully, my throat suddenly dry, feeling very glad that I was in my own body.

I had been a horse, a bird, a spider, a mouse. I’d been a lizard, a fly, even an alien. In each of those forms, I’d had thoughts—feelings—memories. I’d felt the rush of adrenaline, the burning sensation of fear and shame, the soaring tingle of euphoria—all the familiar flags of normal, human emotion.

I hadn’t stopped to ask how that was possible, in bodies so different from my own. It had just felt so normal—so _obvious._ On some deep, unconscious level, I’d just assumed that my human body was _out there_ somewhere, hooked up to the morph through some kind of real-time VR link.

But if my body’s functions were paused so thoroughly that _air wasn’t even circulating through my lungs—_

Then my synapses couldn’t be firing. My nerves couldn’t be sending signals. My neurotransmitters couldn’t be ebbing and flowing.

Which meant that I couldn’t be thinking.

 _Calm down, Cassie. It_ works, _remember? You must have morphed almost a hundred times by now. No point in freaking out._

But what was going _on?_

*        *        *

 

Maybe I was just going crazy, out in the woods all by myself.

It was Sunday, almost a full week since I’d left the others. I was maybe twelve miles out from the cave, hunting bears in the new valley I’d discovered.

Not to eat, of course—after a night of raw berries and cold terror, I’d gone back to staying in morph pretty much all the time. It _had_ occurred to me that I could use morphing to make infinite food, if I was willing to chop off my own leg—

—and it had occurred to me to be pretty disturbed about the fact that this thought had occurred to me at all—

—but I wasn’t willing, and I’m pretty much a vegetarian anyway, so that was that.

No, I was looking for a rematch.

Closing my eyes, I finished my morph, and when I opened them again, my vision was razor sharp once again. This time, I’d gone with the peregrine falcon, the fastest animal on earth. Picking my way awkwardly through the pine needles, I found a nice, clear space and launched skyward.

It had all started by accident, while I was inside of a badger on autopilot. I had been daydreaming, paying too little attention, and had stumbled across another badger, this one just slightly larger than me.

I’d read that badgers were not particularly territorial, but I suppose some combination of the fact that this one was in the middle of dinner and that I had tumbled out of a bush practically right in its face was enough to set it off. It reared, hissing, and my own body responded, and before I knew what was happening, the pair of us were snapping and swiping and grappling as we rolled through the undergrowth.

Despite the other badger’s size, I had human ingenuity on my side—I managed to shake it off by tossing dirt into its eyes and mouth and then using the sticks littering the forest floor as pikes. Disgruntled, it had retreated back into a thicket, leaving me to lick my wounds and demorph.

Except that I hadn’t demorphed—not right away. I’d stayed in the badger body, feeling the twinge and ache of bruises, the delicious trickle of blood from my scratches—

— _delicious?—_

—the heavy, wet heat of adrenaline and exhaustion. The sudden battle had awakened something buried just beneath the surface, something decidedly “not Cassie” and yet very, very much _me._

Maybe it was the stress. The fear, the doubt, the impotent helplessness.

Maybe it was the isolation. Seven days with only a few hours of sleep, without human contact of any kind.

Maybe it was the morphing. The raw, animalistic instinct.

Or maybe, just maybe, the mask was slipping a little. I’d always known I wasn’t really a good person, deep down inside. It was why I tried so hard—why I put so much effort into my morals, my code, my way of living. I couldn’t live the way Rachel did, always on the edge of fury. I needed more of a buffer.

But my buffer was wearing thin.

I still tried to justify it, inside my head—told myself that I didn’t actually know enough about how most of my morphs would hold up in a fight, that I needed some real-life experience. I’d learned a bit about rhinos and elephants from my mom at the Gardens, and I knew a lot about wolf hunting behavior, but—

Where was a barn owl, in the pecking order?

Could a gorilla handle a grizzly?

How effective was a skunk’s spray, really?

Were ferrets better at wrestling, or at running away?

I made a little list of questions, every one of them plausible, every one a cover for the real reason—that I’d dug my teeth into the other badger’s shoulder, and I’d _enjoyed_ it.

That might have scared me, if I’d let myself think about it.

I started picking fights, at first in situations where I knew I’d have the upper hand, but growing gradually bolder as I realized that starting to demorph would scare away almost any animal except a moose. Moose are crazy—I can’t remember where I learned that, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to risk it.

I’d decided to start every battle on autopilot, to see what the animal brain would do, find out what each animal’s natural style could teach me. I’d worked my way upward from skunks and raccoons to foxes and wolves, and was now tracking a huge, grumpy black bear who’d thoroughly outmatched my kangaroo morph.

I was going too far, I knew. I could _feel_ myself going too far, could feel myself spiraling again, upward this time, losing control.

But what good was control?

Control wasn’t going to save my parents.

Spotting the bear in the bushes below, I circled, marking its general direction, confirming as always that there were no humans nearby. Aiming for a clear space a few hundred yards ahead of it, I swooped, dropping down into the tall, dry grass.

The valley I had discovered was almost perfect as a hiding spot, a mile-long gash through the mountain with steep, rocky walls, narrow entryways, and trees growing out from either side, forming a kind of tunnel or trellis. Only in the very center was the gap wide enough for the sun to poke through, shining down on a medium-sized meadow with a creek running down its center. You wouldn’t notice the valley at all unless you were directly above it, or unless you happened to spot the tiny, twisting pathways through the brambles at either end.

Between fights, I’d begun cutting down some of the trees inside, using the beaver morph to cut through the trunks and the elephant morph to move them, being careful not to thin out the canopy too much. I had an idea that I might be able to build an actual shelter, right next to the spring where the creek bubbled out from the rock.

But at the moment, I had more pressing matters to attend to. The bear had rolled down into the valley and was currently picking its way idly through the berry bushes— _my_ berry bushes—at the edge of the clearing. In another few minutes, it would pass right by the hollow where I was quietly demorphing.

_Rock, paper, scissors, bear._

I had yet to test out the tiger, the rhino, the gorilla, or the grizzly, as none of the opponents I’d come across rated quite that level of firepower. The best fights were the ones where the other animal was stronger than me—where ingenuity and nerve made the difference.

_The gorilla._

I spared a brief regret for the fact that I didn’t have any rope—I was still conscientious enough to avoid giving any of my opponents a concussion that might be lethal, but it would’ve been nice to acquire the bear—and took in a deep breath as the last of the feathers disappeared from my arms, leaving me fully human. The bear was only a hundred yards away, now, and I was about to refocus when another, more interesting possibility occurred to me.

It had been days since I’d morphed Elfangor—not since the morning after his brother fell silent, when I’d checked one last time to see if the voice had returned. I’d been sort of reluctant to return to it, after that—it was another reminder of just how alone I was, out here in the mountains.

But I’d made up my mind to return to the city tomorrow night anyway, and in the meantime, I was curious to see how the Andalite body would react to the autopilot trick. It was a strange mix of predator and prey, at least according to Earth archetypes—I wasn’t sure whether it would be aggressive and confident, or stealthy and cautious.

Raising a hand to shade my eyes, I looked over toward the edge of the clearing, where the bear had changed direction slightly and was now pulling at a young sapling. If it stuck to its general pattern, I had at least another couple of minutes before it reached me.

Closing my eyes, I held the image of Elfangor in my mind and began the change.

Even though Andalites had fur and hooves, the process of morphing into one was very different from the process of morphing into an Earth mammal. It was mostly the extra eyes and the extra pair of limbs, I guess—more than anything, it reminded me of morphing into a cockroach or an ant.

This time, instead of bursting out of my chest or stomach, the extra legs emerged from the ones I already had, the flesh and bone pinching and splitting right down the middle, giving me a nauseating glimpse of my own marrow before filling out again with new muscle. I would have flinched, but I was used to things like that now—two days earlier, when morphing into a trout, my skin and tendons had melted away from my hands almost entirely before the bones themselves began to shrink.

I felt my jawbone begin to dissolve as my throat sealed shut, my digestive tract shifting and rearranging itself, reaching down into my legs. With an audible _crack_ , my four knees reversed themselves, and I fell forward onto my arms, lifting myself back up as my fingers multiplied from ten to fourteen.

It wasn’t so bad. Last week, I’d gotten more than halfway into fly morph while remaining entirely full-size. I’d had a proboscis that was _three feet long._

My body began to rebalance as the long Andalite tail extruded itself from my spine, the blade growing out like a fingernail while the fur sprouted all along my back and sides. I felt a brief absence, a partial blindness as my brain switched over to four-eyed vision before the eyes themselves appeared, and then the stalks emerged from the back of my skull.

This time, the final change was in my nose and ears, the former flattening and splitting into an extra pair of elongated nostrils while the latter grew delicate, elfin points and slid backwards toward my “neck.” I felt the Andalite sense of smell emerge—not as keen as a wolf’s, but still better than a human’s—and the morph was complete.

Rearing up into centaur stance, I checked on the bear. It was closer, still unaware of my presence as it dug at a gopher barrow. Swishing my tail back and forth, I concentrated, looking for the little mental catch that was the autopilot switch.

_Click._

I almost didn’t react quickly enough. Without the slightest hint of warning, my tail blade whipped forward, striking toward my own throat. I seized control with less than an inch to spare, the muscles quivering and spasming as the Andalite equivalent of adrenaline flooded my system.

<YEERK!> bellowed a voice in my mind, loud and harsh and impossibly close. <GET OUT OF MY HEAD!>


	12. Tobias

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tobias and Garrett search for the source of the telepathic distress signal.

**Chapter 11: Tobias**

Cold like knives, even through the thick blubber of the sperm whale’s body—water so cold it should have been ice.

<We’re not afraid.>

Darkness blacker than the inside of a grave, darkness somehow _close_ , rather than distant—like the rest of the universe had disappeared, leaving only nothingness.

<We’re not afraid because if we let ourselves get too scared we might not be able to do what needs to be done.>

Pressure so great that even the whale was claustrophobic, the weight of a truck pressing down on each and every inch of my body, squeezing tighter and tighter as it tried to crush me down to a point, a speck, a singularity.

<And we aren’t the type of people who back down. We’re the type of people who do the right thing, even if it’s hard.>

I had never been so afraid.

Not when my mom walked out on me. Not when I’d run away from Oak Landing and spent a week on the street. Not even on the night Elfangor had died, when we’d gotten our first glimpse of the horror to come. Always, always, always, there had been a way out, or a way to fight back, or a place to hide.

<Right now, the right thing is to rescue Elfangor’s brother.>

Garrett’s voice floated through the nightmare, unspooling in my thoughts.

<Because the world’s in trouble, and he might be able to help us save it.>

My words, reflected back at me. My own reassurances, only half-sincere, sounding so much stronger coming from the heart of Garrett’s steely certainty.

<And even if he can’t, or if we can’t find him, we’ll just do the next thing, and the next, and the next. We’ll keep on trying until we figure out a way.>

We hung in the infinite blackness, two tiny spots of warmth and life, using the sperm whale’s echolocation to stay within thought-speak range of one another as we circled, searching. We were at least a mile and a half below the surface, deep enough that the used-up air in our lungs felt like it was slowly turning to diamonds.

<We’re not afraid,> Garrett began again, his inflection unchanged, starting the loop for what felt like the hundredth time.

It was our third trip into the abyss. Our third try, since reaching the point where the distress beacon seemed to be coming from absolutely straight down. We’d spent a day and a half on a cargo ship that was going in mostly the right direction, and had gone overboard with a small buoy and some rope once it seemed like we weren’t getting any closer. We’d come the rest of the way as whales, demorphing in shifts, stopping every few hours to confirm our direction.

<We’re not afraid because if we let ourselves get too scared we might not be able to do what needs to be done.>

It had been hell. The waves in this part of the ocean were nearly fifteen feet high, and it was cold enough that frost would form on my hair in the brief seconds between morphs. We were getting better at staying out of the water—as one of us began to demorph, the other would rise up beneath him, forming a kind of island—but every now and then a rogue wave would crash over us and we’d spend a harrowing minute or two just trying not to drown.

<And we aren’t the type of people who back down.>

At first, it had been the mission that held me together, kept me going. Rescuing a fallen warrior, defeating the Yeerks, saving the world. Fate of humanity on our shoulders, and all that. Those were the words I’d used to bolster Garrett, to hold back his panic the first time he’d sucked down a lungful of sea foam. They were the words that had first carried me down into the darkness.

<We’re the type of people who do the right thing, even if it’s hard.>

But as the rest of the world faded away, so did the sense that any of that mattered. I _wanted_ to care—wanted to believe that what I was doing was the right thing, that it would make a difference.

But all I felt was fear. Fear, and an overwhelming desire to escape. To give up, go home, find another way. That little voice, whispering in my head— _what’s humanity ever done for you, that you should be out here risking death to save it?_

<Right now, the right thing is to rescue Elfangor’s brother.>

It was Garrett who stopped me, then. Not on purpose. Not by _trying._ It’s just—I’d said those words to him, and he’d _believed_ them, you know? Taken them to heart, turned them into armor. They’d actually _worked_.

For him.

Because he trusted me.

I couldn’t take that away from him, couldn’t bring myself to pull the rug out from under him when we were a thousand miles away from home on a mission _I’d_ created.

<Because the world’s in trouble, and he just might be able to help us save it.>

So I’d put on a brave face, pretended to be convinced as we dove, down and down and down into the blackness until even the whale could go no further, the sea floor impossibly far away. I’d maintained my composure as we searched, resurfaced, came up with a new plan and tried again. I’d kept up the act through our second round of demorphing, as we checked on the beacon and noticed that the current had pushed us so that the signal was no longer coming from directly below.

<And even if he can’t, or if we can’t find him, we’ll just do the next thing, and the next, and the next.>

And when we’d realized that it wasn’t working, that we’d have to try something _truly_ dangerous—

That’s when I’d almost lost it. When I’d found myself clinging to Garrett’s mantra for dear life, wishing I believed it so hard that I almost actually did.

<We’ll keep on trying until we figure out a way.>

I turned uselessly in the darkness, pulling my fins against the liquid midnight, feeling a soft ribbon of warmth on my face as I passed through the trail of my own blood.

“Anything small is a deathwish,” Cassie had said, that first afternoon in the barn. “Nowhere to demorph if you run into trouble. It’s got to be a sperm whale or a giant squid, and I don’t know how we’d get either one.”

We’d gotten the whale, whether through dumb luck or divine intervention or some crazy plot I still didn’t understand. But it was the squid that went deeper—all the way to the bottom.

There were whales that came up from the black, bleeding from sucker scars, with squid body parts sloshing around in their bellies.

There were others that didn’t come up at all.

<We’re not afraid.>

Only I was, deep down in my bones—a gnawing, clawing fear that made me afraid that even my thought-speak would come out unsteady. It was like being buried alive, or like being paralyzed—like one of those nightmares where you’re unable to move as you watch the monster closing in.

It had been Garrett’s idea to try wounding one of the whale bodies, to see if the blood would attract a squid where our random zigzagging had not. We’d considered doing rock-paper-scissors, until we’d realized that would mean we’d both have to be demorphed at the same time in fifteen-foot waves.

And until I’d realized that I couldn’t stick a tail blade into Garrett. Not even to save the world. Not when I could just tell him to cut me, instead.

<We’re not afraid because if we let ourselves get too scared we might not be able to do what needs to be done.>

I fired off an echolocation burst—a sort of _click_ , shockingly loud—and the echoes that came back formed a picture in my head.

Nothing. Just me and Garrett, suspended in infinite emptiness.

<And we aren’t the type of people who back down.>

_You sneered at Marco and Rachel because they weren’t paying enough attention to the big picture._

<We’re the type of people who do the right thing, even if it’s hard.>

 _You flat-out insulted Jake for giving in to_ his _emotions._

<Right now, the right thing is to rescue Elfangor’s brother.>

_And after he faced down three juniors for you, when he didn’t even know you._

It was bizarrely irrelevant—six months in the past and a thousand miles removed. But somehow it helped, mixing together with Garrett’s litany to form just enough glue to hold me together.

<Because the world’s in trouble, and he just might be able to help us save it.>

I fired off another click, let out a fraction of a breath, the bubbles hissing and crackling as they divided and subdivided, crawling upward, vanishing into nothingness. Turning once again, I began to make my way back toward Garrett, the only other object in my universe.

<And even if he can’t, or if we can’t find him, we’ll just do the next thing, and the next, and the next. We’ll keep on trying until—>

<Garrett,> I said, cutting him off.

<Yeah?>

<How many times have you said all that stuff?>

<This morph?>

<Yeah.>

<One hundred and twelve. Almost. You didn’t let me finish.>

I did the rough calculation in my head. He was pretty regular, running through the entire thing about three times every four minutes. <So we’ve got about forty-five minutes left,> I said.

<My time limit’s a hundred and—>

<A hundred and fifty-seven, right. I remember. But we should go up together, just like last time.>

Garrett didn’t say anything. I’d have bet ten dollars he was trying to figure out whether _not being scared_ meant he was supposed to fight to stay down below while I went up and refreshed my clock. I took advantage of the silence to drift past him, firing off another echolocation click. The image bounced back—there was a school of small fish swirling a few hundred yards in the distance, and absolutely nothing else.

Finally, Garrett spoke. <What happens if we can’t get a squid?> he asked quietly.

<We can keep this up for a while,> I pointed out. <I mean, it took us two and a half days to get here. We might as well try for at least a whole day before we give up.>

<I don’t like this,> Garrett said bluntly. <I know you said we’re not supposed to be scared, but I’m scared. I’m scared and I’m cold and I’m tired and I’m scared and I want to go back to—>

<Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, come on,> I said gently, stopping him before he could spiral out of control. <I’m right here with you, okay? We’re—we’ve got this.>

<You’re scared too,> he shot back. <And you don’t want to be here, either.>

I started to object, felt the words catch in my thoughts, ended up saying nothing.

_He trusts you. That doesn’t mean he’s blind._

I had lied to Garrett—real, outright lies—exactly twice in the whole three years we’d known each other. Both times had been for his own good, and they’d still both felt like betrayal. Lying to him wasn’t _like_ lying to anyone else. He didn’t have any defenses against it. He knew his view of the world was broken, knew that his brain came up with the wrong answer half the time, and so he either trusted you or he didn’t—no middle ground.

Which means that if I told him something, he’d just—take it. Take it in, believe it, make it a part of his universe.

I could convince him he was wrong. That I was brave, that I wanted to be there, that the mission felt just as important to me now as it had back when we were both safe on dry land.

But I didn’t want to. Not for what it would cost.

<You’re right,> I said finally. <I’m scared, too. I’ve never been more scared in my life. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to _die_ down here. >

<So why don’t we just leave?>

I clicked again, found him in the darkness, brushed one of his fins with mine. <Because everything we said before is still true,> I said. <Because I _do_ want to stop them. The Yeerks. And this—I think this is how we have to do it. >

<Doesn’t _feel_ like saving the world, > Garrett said. <Feels like—like—like—>

<I know,> I said, my own fear ebbing a little as the arguments began to take hold, as I said the words and _forced_ myself to believe them. <But there’s nobody else, right? I mean literally nobody else. Jake won’t do it, and if there were other Andalites out there, they’d have found him by now. We’re his only hope. And we—we’re the kind of people who don’t back down.>

I paused, waiting.

_Come on, buddy._

<We’re the type of people who do the right thing,> Garrett said dully.

<Even if it’s hard,> I said, packing as much confidence as I could into my tone.

<Even if it’s hard.>

<Right now, the right thing is exactly what we’re already doing. There’s two of us—we can handle ourselves as long as we watch each other’s back. And if we want to stop the Yeerks, this is the place to be.>

There was another long pause. <Yeah,> said Garrett. <Maybe.>

I reached out with my fin again, brushed it gently against his, and turned outward once more, facing the darkness.

I couldn’t blame him for being skeptical. I’d almost lost my grip on the connection myself—that saving the world meant beating the Yeerks, which meant gathering intel and allies, which meant rescuing Elfangor’s brother, which meant acquiring a truly deep-water morph, which meant trapping a giant squid, which somehow translated into hanging out in pitch black water a mile beneath the surface of the ocean with a ten-foot gash down my side, waiting for a monster to come along and try to eat me.

There were a lot of steps between A and B. A lot of jumps that the emotional half of my brain didn’t fully buy. It _sounded_ true, but it didn’t _feel_ true.

Or rather, it had felt a lot truer three days ago, when we’d been focused on what could go right instead of what could go wrong.

<Tobias?>

I threw another click and turned back toward Garrett, swimming once more through the trail of my own blood. <Yeah?> I called out.

<Tobias, come back.>

I started to reply, then stopped short, an icicle of fear piercing through my confused, cobbled-together courage.

<I hear it, too,> I said, my thought-speak instinctively dropping to a whisper. <I’m coming.>

It was a kind of _whooshing_ sound, somewhere in the empty blackness beyond my friend—a soft, distant pulse, with just the barest hint of a gurgle behind it. Somewhere underneath the layer of my control, I felt the whale brain awaken, felt it come alive with predatory interest even as the human part of me began to come apart.

_Run leave hide go get out get up go up to the light the light the surface get away from it run—_

A chorus, an avalanche, a flood of voices as nearly every part of my mind and soul united in sudden, urgent agreement. This wasn’t where I wanted to die. This wasn’t a fight I needed to pick. Every lingering doubt, every unanswered question, all the other possible plans I’d only half-imagined—in that moment, they were all outlined in bold, clear and sharp and undeniable, all pointing in the same direction.

_Leave!_

Only—

When I tried—

I couldn’t—

It was like something in my mind had turned to stone—some part of me that wasn’t _quite_ able to drive me forward, but was absolutely adamant that I _would not go back._ I pushed at it, frantic—scrabbled at it, threw myself against it and from the depths of my panic shouted _why_ —

Garrett.

_He can leave WITH you, asshole! He’s RIGHT THERE!_

Only that wasn’t it. Not quite.

<Tobias,> Garrett called out again, fear edging his thought-speak, and in that instant a memory flashed across my mind, a memory made of everything I hated about the world.

 _We made a promise,_ I’d said.

_I’m just saying. If you’d broken it. If you hadn’t come back. You could’ve—I wouldn’t have blamed you._

Garrett, thinking I had left him behind at Oak Landing, and telling himself it wasn’t betrayal.

It was a tiny thing, really.

Just faith.

Just trust.

Just one sad little orphan kid who had no reason to believe that the universe would _ever_ be fair—that there was any such thing as justice or kindness or honor. A kid who would stay or go depending on what I did, who was looking to me to show him what the world was made of.

If it had just been Elfangor’s brother, I wouldn’t have had the courage. But I had something else to protect—something I had never put my finger on until that exact moment.

<Don’t think,> I said sharply, surging past him in the inky water. <Drop into the whale. Feel it—it isn’t afraid.>

<Tobias, I don’t think I can—>

<Let _go,_ Garrett, > I repeated, and then I took my own advice, wrapping myself in the whale’s supreme confidence.

_Okay. Let’s hunt._

I could still feel my own fear, the desire for air and light and safety. But it was different now, smaller and easier to deal with. It was as if it had been drawing its power from my own indecision—from the possibility that I _might_ decide to run—and now that the door had finally shut, it was just a quiet, irrelevant voice.

<Hang back,> I said. <Stay right here, don’t move. If it figures out that there are two of us, it might run, and I don’t know if we’re fast enough to catch it.>

<But—>

<I’ll be fine. Wait until it’s too late—until we’re tangled up—and then you’ll be the cavalry. Okay?>

<What if you go out of range?>

<You can still hear me. Swim slow—quiet.>

The sound of the squid was noticeably clearer already, somewhat higher in the water than we were and heading almost straight across the “horizon,” from left to right. Putting on a burst of speed, I pulled ahead and turned parallel to its course, leading it by what my whale brain told me was something like a mile.

<What are you doing?> Garrett asked. The fear had disappeared from his voice once again, and somewhere in my soul I pumped a victorious fist into the air.

<It’s too far away. I need to cross in front of it, give it a chance to smell the blood.>

Flexing against the cold, I tried to pull the long, thin gash on my flank open wider, encouraging more blood to spill into the water. I slowed my pace, letting both fins move in a sluggish, erratic pattern.

_Come on. Easy prey. Come and get it._

A long minute passed. I slowed down a little more, trying to make plenty of noise in the water. Behind me, I heard a change in the pulsing pattern as the squid paused, then picked up speed. I fired off a click—still too distant to “see” anything—and thrashed a little, hoping to seal the deal.

<It’s heading right for you,> Garrett said quietly. <It just zipped past me. Didn’t even slow down.>

<Good,> I said. <Stay back a little longer.>

<It’s big, Tobias.>

I felt another little spike of fear, felt it disappear in the wash of the whale’s frustration. The whale wanted to _move_ —to turn and hunt, not to feign weakness.

But I was firmly in control, and I slowed my body’s pace even further, letting my tail drag listlessly in the water. <How big?> I asked.

<I couldn’t see it. Big.>

_Turn and face it? Or pretend to run?_

The whooshing was much louder now. Stalling in the water, I turned and let out another click, receiving a snapshot in return.

Horror—horror so thick that even the whale’s predatory enthusiasm dimmed.

It was _enormous_ —its main body more than half as long as my own, and its tentacles a writhing mass even larger still. I fired off three more clicks in rapid succession to get a sense of its speed.

_Fast._

The whale wanted to reorient, to face the monster head-on, but I resisted the instinct, instead curving back toward Garrett, leading it on, hearing the swish and gurgle as it changed course to match. <Five more seconds,> I said. <It’s coming in pretty—AAARRRGGHHHH!>

< _TOBIAS! >_

Pain. Pain like hot knives digging into my flesh, pain like being torn in half. With chilling, alien intelligence, the squid had reached out with its two longest tentacles and gone straight for the wound in my side, tearing the gash wider, peeling back layers of already-weakened flesh. I thrashed wildly, trying to get away, and only made it worse, my own motion ripping an entire section of muscle away from my ribs.

< _NO! >_

I screamed, the air emptying from my lungs as I twisted in the water, dragging the squid along behind me. I managed to close my jaws over two of its tentacles just as two others lanced into my face, one of them pressing down over my eye. It pulled away, taking the eyelid with it, only to be replaced an instant later by two more. Yet another tentacle hammered at my back, its suckers shredding the skin and blubber like a chainsaw.

I could feel myself shutting down already, waves of pain and shock crashing into my brain, fracturing my thoughts. The squid was everywhere—above, below, in my eyes, in my mouth. The water around me was thick and hot with blood, and even as I caught another tentacle in my mouth and bit it off, I could tell it wouldn’t be enough.

I beat feebly at the water with my fins, hoping to strike something breakable. An inner darkness began to descend as oxygen deprivation took its course.

_No—wait—you—_

_< EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE>_

Suddenly, the squid spasmed, every tentacle retracting in a defensive reflex.

< _EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE >_

It was—not thought-speak, exactly. Something deeper, louder, more primal—a wordless mental siren more piercing than the loudest shriek. It smashed into me like a shock wave, erasing every thought, every feeling, every order I might have sent to my failing limbs. I fell limp in the water, felt the squid’s grip loosen.

< _EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE >_

A vast presence, like an airplane flying too close overhead. Something swept past me in the water, slamming into the squid with the force of a freight train. Two of the tentacles tore away from me, taking slivers of flesh with them. A third remained, tearing away from the squid instead.

< _EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeaauh >_

Almost as suddenly as it had begun, the scream tapered and died, replaced by confusion and noise. I could hear thrashing—feel the waves of pressure as the water churned violently around me—track the voice in my head as it shouted nonsense. Time passed in immeasurable surges, seconds indistinguishable from centuries.

<Tobias! Up, _now! >_

I didn’t move, didn’t reply. I’d forgotten _how_ to reply—forgotten that movement was a thing I was capable of doing.

Something slammed into me from below, driving me upward. <Tobias!> the voice screamed again. <I can’t do this by myself!>

I could feel the movement of water against my face, the sensation of swimming. Somewhere deep inside the whale, instinct stirred, begging to be unleashed, to take control, to do _something_ —

But I didn’t know how to let go.

< _TOBIAS! >_

Around me, the cold began to recede, replaced by a pleasant warmth. My one working eye began to register color—first the darkest midnight blue, then navy, and then, with shocking speed, the royal blue of twilight.

I could see.

Me.

_I._

With a convulsive effort, I dragged myself awake, pushed back against my confusion. <Garrett?> I called out.

<Tobias! Swim! Now, up, demorph!>

His tone was sharp and commanding like I’d never heard it, and I responded without question, marshaling my ruined body. What didn’t hurt was terrifyingly numb, and I could barely manage a rhythm with my tail as my empty lungs screamed in protest, but I did what I could. As I took control, I felt the pressure beneath my belly vanish, Garrett slipping out from under me to continue his own arduous climb.

Two thousand feet—one thousand—five hundred—closer and closer, fighting against blackout the whole way, and finally we broke the surface, my whale body literally coming to pieces as I sucked in a huge, gasping breath.

<Demorph!>

Again, I didn’t ask questions, just focused as hard as I could. I was halfway through the change before enough of my own nerves had returned to give me a reliable sense of my own body. Just in time, too—the waves were still over ten feet high, and as most of my mass vanished back into whatever dimension it had come from, I found myself desperately treading water.

“Garrett?” I called out, trying to keep my head above the surface.

<Here,> came the exhausted reply, though without any sense of direction attached.

I turned in a circle, craning my neck as a swell carried me up and then back down again. “Where?” I shouted.

There was a _pop-hiss_ , and a geyser spout appeared a few dozen yards to my right. Holding my breath, I ducked below the surface and opened my eyes.

The water around me was pink with blood and bits of gore, most of it freefloating but some of it leaking from the hundreds of welts and sucker wounds on the sperm whale floating quietly beside me. Two of the squid’s tentacles were still wrapped around the whale’s body, emerging from the shattered blob of jelly cradled gently in its mouth.

<Acquire it,> Garrett said, his tone flat.

He swam toward me, breaking the surface, and I climbed up onto his back, reaching out to place my palm on one of the columns of flesh. Closing my eyes, I focused, feeling the transfer as the squid’s DNA became a part of me.

<Keep it in the trance as long as you can.>

Beneath me, the flesh of the whale began to shift and melt, the suckers tearing away as Garrett shrank out from under them. Taking in another breath, I wrapped my arms around the limp tentacle, maintaining my focus to keep the monster from waking back up. A minute or so later, and Garrett was treading water beside me, his own hand small and pale as it pressed up against the mottled pink flesh next to mine.

“Want to go bird for a while?” I asked. “Catch our breath?”

“No,” he said curtly. “Keep acquiring it.”

“What—”

“Just keep it from waking up.”

As I watched, Garrett began to swell again, the now-familiar pattern of the sperm whale’s skin emerging like a rash. He leaned away from me, filling his lungs and disappearing below the waves.

<Move,> he commanded, sixty seconds later.

I moved.

Beside me, the squid began to stir, its last two tentacles waving feebly in the swells. For a single, nerve-wracking moment, I thought it might still have enough energy to lash out, and then a mountain emerged from the water, Garrett’s mouth gaping open large enough to swallow a car.

It took maybe two minutes for him to eat what was left of the squid, two minutes in which neither of us said a word. When he was finished, he dove down under the surface again, rising up beneath me like a living island.

< _Now_ you can go bird, > he said.

“What about—”

<No flying.>

*        *        *

 

Darkness?

 _What_ darkness?

All around us was a world of light, traced out in impossibly faint swirls and streaks, the currents themselves glowing like something out of _Pocahontas_ or _Fern Gully._ Near the bottom, I could see the blues and purples of deep-sea fish, the Christmas-light lures of predators, but even in the upper darkness, the water glowed with life.

<Pretty,> Garrett had said, and then he’d fallen silent, tracing patterns in the black with his tentacles, his enormous eyes following the motes of light as they flared and vanished.

It wasn’t just pretty. Everything that moved— _every_ living thing that plied the depths—they all left trails and patterns behind them. There must have been something in the water, some microscopic algae or bacteria that glowed briefly when disturbed. It was incredibly subtle, dimmer than the dimmest star—but the squid’s eyes could see it.

More than once, we’d spotted a sperm whale or another squid in the distance by the glow they created as they churned through the water. It was an unbelievable adaptation, and a totally unexpected bonus as we drifted across the seafloor, avoiding anything and everything that looked like trouble.

It also helped with the search. There were islands of light, warm pockets near hydrothermal vents where everything sparkled and glowed, but in between was utter black, layered over a mishmash of mud, rock, and alien vegetation. By stirring the water with our fins, we could get a sort of contour map even in the deepest, darkest places.

By my guess, we were about two and a half miles down. After our first dive as squids, I’d done some rough sketches on Garrett’s back, using the Andalite tail to carve shallow, painless scratches in the sperm whale’s thick skin. At two and a half miles, I figured we could be at most a quarter of a mile off while still thinking we were right above the beacon—any more than that, and we would be able to tell that the angle of the signal wasn’t quite up-and-down.

But that still left a pretty wide patch of ocean floor to cover. A quarter mile radius meant half a mile across, which meant something like fifty or sixty city blocks. Not to mention that we knew a straight dive wasn’t actually taking us straight down—we were trying to adjust for the current, but there was no way to tell, underwater, whether we’d gone too far or not enough.

And so we were on our sixth trip down to the seafloor—our ninth dive, in total. Almost eighteen hours underwater, with basically nothing but five-minute breaks in between.

<Hold still. I think I hear something.>

Instantly, I ceased my regular pulsing, let the squid body’s tentacles drift loose. <On the floor?> I asked, coming smoothly to a halt. <Or in the water?>

<In the water.> Above me, Garrett shot upwards, the faintest of neon trails marking his movements. Leveling off, he began turning in a tight circle, scanning the darkness.

<It’s a whale,> he said, after a long moment. <Up above, near the pressure limit. We should be fine.>

I waited, motionless, as he drifted back down. <You sure?> I asked. <We could head in the other direction.>

<No, it’s fine,> he said. <Let’s keep looking.>

We fanned out again, crawling our way along the seafloor, occasionally poking or prodding at something with our tentacles. Once in a while, some strange creature would burst forth, but always to flee, never to attack. Down here, we were at the absolute top of the food chain, the deep-sea version of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

That hadn’t stopped Garrett, of course. For the first few hours after the attack—minus the ten minutes when we’d first encountered the lights—he’d been completely unreasonable. Hypervigilant and overprotective, he’d insisted that we avoid every possible danger, twice forcing us back up to the surface after only a couple of minutes.

I hadn’t fought back particularly hard. The incident with the squid had been almost too quick to be traumatizing—not even two minutes had passed before Garrett intervened, and the combination of shock and demorphing had erased pretty much all of the damage, both psychic and physical.

But that didn’t change the fact that I’d been completely confident right up until the moment everything had fallen apart, or the fact that Garrett had quite literally saved my life. His nervous fear was probably just as much of an overreaction as my arrogance had been, but it was the sort of overreaction that was unlikely to get either one of us killed.

Once he’d seen that I was on board—that I was really _listening,_ not just humoring him, and that I wasn’t going to take any stupid risks—he’d relaxed a little, and the search process had sped up.

Which was a good thing, because as far as I could tell, we might have been searching the same tiny patch over and over again.

<You’re _sure_ this is a different place? > I asked as we drifted over a vent oasis packed with tube worms and lit by the glow of lantern fish.

<Yes.>

I watched as he waved his tentacles over a flat patch of mud, stirring up motes and revealing the harder floor beneath. <Any idea how much ground we’ve covered?> I asked tentatively.

<I dunno,> he said. <Maybe…fifteen Oak Landings? Including the playground?>

So, something like thirty blocks. Half of the search zone, assuming we were in the right place to begin with.

<How do you keep track like that?> I asked. <I mean, is it—automatic? Like the numbers thing?>

<Sort of.> He floated up and over a ridge and back out into the deep, and I followed, turning slightly to cover an adjacent swath of ground. <It’s like—I dunno. It’s like drawing on paper? In pen? Like I’m making a map. And when I go to put something on the map, if it’s already there, if it looks exactly like something I’ve already drawn, then obviously we’ve been there before.>

<Yeah, but how can you _tell? > _I said, unable to keep the envy out of my voice. <It’s all pretty much the same.>

<You have to look at the parts that matter,> he said simply. <Not the plants or the mud. The rocks, the vents, the hills.>

<But they’re all the _same._ >

<Not to me.>

I was quiet for a long moment. At first, we’d talked almost constantly, but at some point over the past eighteen hours we’d gotten used to long pauses between thoughts.

<Can you tell where there are holes?> I asked finally. <Like, do you know where we still have to check?>

<Some of it. Some parts of the map haven’t connected yet. But right now we’re kind of cutting across this big hole in the middle. Once we get to the part we’ve already seen before, we’ll want to go—>

He hesitated. <Left, I think. Unless we’re drifting.>

We fell silent again and continued onward, pulsing our way through the psychedelic darkness. Two more times, Garrett called a halt to check on a sound, once changing course in response. Inch by inch, we carved up the territory, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

<Tobias?> Garrett asked, as we passed out of yet another vent.

<Yeah?>

<What happens if we beat the Yeerks?>

<What do you mean?>

<If we win. Starve them out of everybody’s heads and blow up the pool and all that. Say we even take out whatever mothership is up in orbit. What then?>

I swept my tentacles left and right in the darkness, lighting up a field of rough, volcanic boulders. <I guess—>

I broke off. _I guess we just go back to our regular lives,_ I’d started to say.

Only that didn’t make any sense. There were _aliens._ Aliens with ray guns and telepathic technology, aliens with faster-than-light travel. Morphing technology alone was the kind of thing that would radically change the world, forever, and that wasn’t even counting all the other advancements we could probably get out of studying it.

<I guess we can’t really know until we get there,> I said.

Beside me, Garrett stopped, his squid body falling unnaturally still in the water. <But that’s stupid,> he said, a hint of anger creeping into his voice. <We have to make _plans_ , right?>

<I don’t think we _can_ ,> I pointed out. <I mean, so many things are going to be different that all of our regular guesses are going to be way off, you know? Like how people thought we’d have flying cars, but that phones would still have wires attached to them and stuff.>

<But that’s not going to _matter! >_ Garrett shouted, the anger suddenly fanning into flame. <How are we going to stop the _rest_ of them? >

<What?> I asked, wrong-footed.

<The rest of them! On their homeworld, and out there in the galaxy! How does killing one bunch of them _here_ make any difference at all? Won’t they just come _back? >_

*        *        *

 

<Is that it?> Garrett asked quietly.

<It has to be,> I said.

Reaching out, I brushed away the thin layer of silt that had settled across the smooth, curved surface. I could sense a constant vibration through my tentacle, a technologic hum like fluorescent lights. A cold, steely smell flooded the squid’s nostrils, with a touch of ozone like an old electric train set.

 

<It’s definitely alive,> I reported. <Or—on. Powered. Whatever.>

 _We did it. Twenty fucking hours under the sea, and we_ found _it._ I tried to rein in my excitement, to remind myself that we were—at best—halfway there, but it didn’t work.

I was touching an alien spaceship. Sometimes, you’ve just got to let yourself freak out.

<There’s no light,> Garrett pointed out.

<Maybe because it’s an escape pod?> I reached out with all of my tentacles, wrapping my suckers around the edges as I gently lifted it up and off of the seafloor.

<Aren’t escape pods supposed to be super findable?> Garrett asked.

<Not when they’re in hostile territory.>

I moved the pod away from the underwater embankment where it had been half-buried. It was heavy, but fairly easy to move, its overall shape streamlined and clean, sharply tapered at one end like an almond or an egg. It couldn’t have been more than three or four feet wide, and less than ten feet long—about the size of a really big couch, or a really small car.

<Can you lift it? Like, up to the surface?>

I swam upward experimentally, hauling the pod behind me. <Not quite,> I said. <I think the two of us can get it together, though. And once we get it up high enough, we can use the whale again.>

<And then?>

I let go of the pod, watched the gentle tracings of bioluminescence as it settled back into the muck at the bottom of the ocean.

<Then we find ourselves a desert island.>

*        *        *

 

“Okay, let’s go over it one more time.”

“He doesn’t know his brother’s dead. That’s going to be the first big shock. And from what Elfangor told us, giving technology to aliens is a no-no, so he’s not going to be happy about _that_ , either. And it seems like the distress beacon was maybe tuned to Elfangor and only Elfangor, so he might just think we’re holding Elfangor captive, or he might think we’re Yeerks.”

I turned to look at the pod, lying in the sand at the edge of the water, the foam washing up and past it with each crashing wave. The sun was setting, but there was still enough light to see that the pod was the deepest, flattest black—as black as the water we’d pulled it from, absorbing every last photon. It seemed to be all one piece, with three exceptions—two small holes near the wider end, which we thought might be thrusters, and one white patch in the center with seven exactly equal sides.

It didn’t exactly say _push me_ , but it was pretty close.

“And if things go south?”

“I find Jake at 209 Aspen Avenue, or Marco at the house we visited before we left, and I tell them everything. If I can’t find them, I go to Canada, or I fight by myself.”

“You go to C—”

“ _Or I fight by myself._ If you’re dead, you don’t get to tell me what to do.”

I didn’t push it. Garrett was already angry that I’d put my foot down about being the one to open the pod, and that I’d ordered him to stay safely out of the way in a small, durable morph.

But it was the right move. You didn’t commit all of your forces to a single risky move unless you had to, and in this case, we _didn’t_ have to. We had no idea how Elfangor’s brother was going to react, and there was no point in us _both_ dying if first contact went badly, as it very well might. His brother had tried to glass the planet, after all.

Garrett had tried to pull some bullshit about being more expendable, but I’d shut him down hard. We were both equally valuable, and I’d actually _talked_ to Elfangor. I’d been the last one to leave him, at the end. Of the two of us, I was obviously the right choice for what was bound to be a tense conversation.

Besides, he’d already saved my life once this trip. The least he could do was let me return the favor.

I took a deep breath, held it, let it halfway out. “Fine,” I said. “You report back to the others, and then you do whatever the hell you want. Just as long as you make it off this island alive.” I fixed him with a steady look, arranging my face into a serious expression even though I knew it would make no difference. “That’s a rule.”

“It’s a rule,” Garrett agreed, each word sounding like a curse.

“Then let’s do this.”

There was no hesitation, this time—no half-hearted mantras, no complicated chains of reasoning. Whatever fears and doubts Garrett might have, he wasn’t giving in to them. And my own priorities were clear—had remained clear since falling into place in the moments before the attack.

Garrett’s faith in humanity wasn’t worth dying for. Not when the rest of the world was at stake. But if I had to die either way, I was sure as hell going to try and pay for it on my way out.

Beside me, I heard the usual squelching as Garrett’s organs began to shift and change. Turning, I focused on the pod, and on the alien who’d put me on the path to finding it.

 _Let him be alive_ , I whispered, to no one in particular. _For Elfangor’s sake. Let him have this one thing._

I fell forward onto my hands, blue fur spreading in waves across my skin, two legs and a tail emerging from the base of my spine.

<You ready?> I asked Garrett, a minute and a half later.

<Yeah,> he answered. I watched with my stalk eyes as he scuttled off to one side, burying himself halfway under the sand. <All set.>

<ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.>

Gathering my resolve, I stepped forward, raising my Andalite hand and spreading my seven fingers.

<Tobias,> Garrett said, just before my palm made contact.

I waited.

<I just—>

Waited.

<Well. Thanks.>

<Oh, shut up,> I shot back, feigning nonchalance. <It’s going to be fine.>

<ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP—>

Leaning forward, I covered the final inch, my hand seeming to sink into the hard white surface. I felt a tingle, sensed movement beneath my fingers, and pulled my hand away as the patch turned black and disappeared.

Nothing else happened.

<Tobias, what—>

<Shhh. Wait.>

Seconds ticked by, stretching out into a minute, then two.

<Is the signal still—>

<No, it stopped.>

Slowly, carefully, I reached out again, placing my hand in the spot where the patch had previously been.

Still nothing.

<Hello?> I called out, cautiously.

There was no answer.

<Do you think it’s—>

Without vibration, without sound, without any kind of warning at all, the black pod suddenly leapt into the air, scattering sand and water as it rocketed skyward. I staggered backward, craning upward with all four eyes, watching as it shrank to the size of a quarter, of a pebble, of a speck. In seconds, it was gone, lost in the fading twilight.

For a long moment, I stood motionless—stunned. With all of the contingency plans we’d thought of, all of the ways things might go wrong, neither one of us had even considered _that._

Beside me, the sand shifted, Garrett’s body slowly rising as he emerged from morph. <Well, what are we supposed to do _now? >_ he asked.

I had absolutely no idea.


	13. Aximili

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our first look inside the mind of an Andalite warrior.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a very complicated thing that happens, when you try to write down what a non-linguistic, telepathic species is trying to say in a rationalist fanfic. For the most part, Andalite concepts are not likely to be expressed in words, when they can be transmitted directly with no need for compression or encapsulation. However, SOME concepts will have been so central, so important to the shared culture and experience, that they will have been encoded in multiple ways. Just as we have the word "peace," the sound "peace," the symbol we make with our fingers, and the circle-with-lines-in-it symbol, so too some Andalite ideas would end up having sights or sounds associated with them—likely through some kind of onomatopoetic metaphor. That's how we get names like "Aximili," "Elfangor," "Alloran," "Seerow," and "Iscafil," and that's how we ended up with the words in the chapter below.
> 
> As always, pretty pretty please leave me some comments or reviews (the more words, the better) either here or at r/rational. It's the only data I get on what's working and what isn't! Thanks for being awesome.

**Chapter 12: Aximili**

[A FOUR-WINGED INSECT, BEAUTIFUL AND DELICATE, CAREFULLY CRADLED IN SEVEN-FINGERED HANDS…

 

_< You will need to be exceptionally cautious, Aximili.>_

I came awake in an instant, the echo of my brother’s voice still fresh in the _dain_. Information flooded my thoughts as the suspension field withdrew from my body—a full cycle’s worth of recordings, compressed and prioritized.

(Why, Elfangor? I could have helped.)

I looked through the eyes of the cradle, into the past. I saw the stars whirling beyond the dome as it spiraled down into the atmosphere, saw the grass shrivel and die as the air itself caught fire. The red-white light of Yeerk Dracon beams seared across the field, carving away massive chunks of my home.

(Was it a feint all along? Is that why the shredders would not fire?)

((But why wouldn’t you have _told_ me?))

I saw, in a flash, the nature of the decoy—the bright explosion, the scattered debris. Saw the bank of cradles, all seven of them still in their places, and my own, black and cloaked, emerging from a hidden compartment, hurtling perpendicular to the path of the falling dome and entering the water well over the horizon.

(The Yeerks would have collected the wreckage, of course.)

I saw the beings who had pulled me from the water—

(How had they found me?)

—saw their forms change—

(The monopoly on morphing has been _lost!?)_

((The cradle could be deceived. The charade could be achieved with holograms, for some other purpose.))

—from angular, many-limbed aquatic darts to soft, pale climbers, ill-adapted for the water—

(Their true form?)

—to an enormous, rock-like swimmer, and back once more to the climbers—

(Their true form. The timing is consistent with the mass synchronization collapse limit.)

((The image they _want_ you to see as their true form. It may still be a hoax.))

—and then—

—impossibly—

—into the shape of my brother, Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul.

_No._

_No._

_It is a lie. A deception. It cannot be._

(But the cradle responded.)

((But they followed the signal.))

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt it awaken—the thunder-crack, the thought-that-is-not-to-be-denied. It moved forward, relentless even as I fought it—as I pretended stone, turned my stalks to the earth.

_Elfangor is dead._

I didn’t _know_ it—not with the brightness of the sun. He could have been captured. He could have been incapacitated. The two strange aliens could have been his agents, his confederates.

But it was the most likely explanation. A full cycle beneath the water—I would not have lain alone so long had he been turned, or had he been capable of maneuver. And these aliens were not equipped, were carrying none of the weapons or tools which my brother surely would have provided them.

(They carry the morphing power.)

((How long would the cradle have held me, if they had not appeared?))

_Elfangor is dead, and his burden falls to me._

Releasing the recording, I opened the cradle’s eyes, looked out at my brother’s stolen face.

_< You see the problem, don’t you, Aximili?>_

Elfangor’s voice, speaking from the _dain._ I listened as I danced my mind across the controls. Fuel levels—good. Stealth capabilities—intact. Navigation—online, and rapidly mapping.

< _They will come for you. >_

External weapons—none.

< _They will come for you, and you will have to face them alone. >_

Zero-space communications—none.

< _There is no way to be sure. No sign that cannot be forged, no secret code that cannot be mimicked. >_

I ran down the list of my emergency supplies. Food—enough for three cycles. One compact scanner, fully charged. Three Shredders, all claiming to be in working order, though after the disastrous battle I had my doubts.

< _There is no proof which you could trust, that you speak to_ me _, and not to one of them. And there is no proof which you could offer me, either. >_

A single command, and I could be in orbit. The cradle was well-made; it was almost certain that it could evade the Yeerks’ notice.

< _You cannot rely on the_ eib. _You cannot even rely on the_ dain. _For seven full sunrises, Alloran walked among us, already lost. >_

A different command, and it would take me to the epicenter. To the structure Elfangor had identified, the lair of the Yeerk coalescion.

< _And do not lower your guard, simply because you see me laying waste to the enemy, or because you have waited for a cycle’s passing. The enemy is not stupid. They understand holograms, and they would gladly sacrifice an ocean of their brood for a seventh of a seventh of a chance at capturing another Andalite. >_

In front of me, the alien leaned forward as if trying to peer through the cradle’s plating, confusion plainly visible in the movement of its stalks, the angle of its tail. I felt the touch of its mind brush across the _eib_ , heard the whisper of a greeting.

< _They will know that you know this. They will remember this very conversation. They will twist my words against you, undermine your reason, play upon your emotions. They will do everything in their power to confuse and ensnare you. They are like the Ellimist, Aximili—everywhere and nowhere at once. >_

I could kill the alien, weapons or no weapons—could use the cradle’s own weight to stun it, crush it, tear open its false form. It was standing there, stupid and defenseless, wearing my brother’s face, an abomination—

(Just as it would if it were innocent.)

((Just as it would if it wanted me to think it were innocent.))

< _You will have to be strong. But more than that, you will have to be clever. You will have to be unpredictable, even to me. Even to Alloran. You will have to leave the Path, become like the wind in thought and deed, or you will find them waiting for you wherever you strike. >_

Fighting back against my despair, I turned away from the _dain_ , closed my mind to the _eib_ and sank deep into the endless quiet of the _hirac._ With an effort, I could manage four lines of thought at once—one bright, one glow, one shade, and one dark.

 _Elfangor_ —

(is dead.)

((is taken.))

(((lives, but is constrained.)))

((((lives and is free, but has left me to my own devices for reasons I do not know.))))

_Then these aliens—_

(are agents of the Yeerks, or allies Elfangor made before he died, or thieves who plundered his ship.)

((are Yeerks.))

(((are his allies, and he has sent them to rescue me, but he has given them no passwords because he knows I cannot trust them anyway.)))

((((are Yeerks, or some third faction that has stolen the morphing power.))))

_Which means—_

(I can do nothing until I know more.)

((I must kill them—except that they _expect_ me to do so, which means it will not hinder their goals, and may somehow further them.))

(((I must avoid them—which Elfangor knows—but that they may be useful in the future.)))

((((they must die.))))

I felt the darkest line end, felt the shadow and glow dissolve into uncertainty as the bright turned once more to the image of my brother’s face outside the cradle.

 _What would_ you _do, brother?_

The question was tinged with the deepest sadness. Always before, there had been an answer, and that answer had been my guiding light. Always before, Elfangor’s path had been _my_ path.

But no longer. Not until I knew for sure that the Yeerks were not hunting along that same trail.

Outside, the alien stretched forward its stolen hand, pressed seven fingers against the side of the cradle.

Friend, or foe?

I didn’t know.

Rising from the _hirac,_ I reached out to the cradle, gave it my instructions.

_I’m sorry, brother._

On a sudden impulse, I dialed down the shielding on the cradle’s core, sending a wash of radiation outward, bathing the two aliens in a particle glow. The half-life of the exhaust was short, and most of the radiation would disappear in the morphing process. But some would remain, some fraction of a fraction of a fraction—enough, I hoped, to be detectable even after multiple cycles, multiple transformations. If these aliens _were_ my allies—

— _Elfangor’s allies—_

 _—_ I would want to be able to find them again.

I took one final look at the alien—at the face of my brother, which I might never see again.

And then I rose into the sky.

*        *        *

 

One pool ship, lurking behind the planet’s satellite—an unfamiliar design, but certainly too small to hold more than two coalescions and a few thousand Controllers.

Four Bug fighters, superficially cloaked and holding in a tetrahedron around the planet—one of Alloran’s favorite siege formations. Four more fighters hovering by the pool ship. Presumably four more down on the surface. I wasn’t sure where the thirteenth might be—I had scanned space for an orbit’s width in every direction and was reasonably confident there were no other ships nearby.

There were signs of infestation sprinkled across the globe—a scattering of strange electromagnetic signals and traces of rare metals—but only the one large cluster, centered on a tightly organized group of structures near the coast of one of the larger land masses.

I had no trouble locating the pool. It was underground, inside one of the alien buildings, defended by an absorption field.

A _full_ absorption field—not a plate, or a wedge, or even a dome, but a complete, flawless sphere, extending as far underground as it did above. There had been rumors that the Yeerks might have salvaged a sphere from the wreckage of the thirteenth fleet, but the rumors had never been confirmed. Certainly there had been no sign of it during the war for the Hork-Bajir, nor in the ongoing struggle for Leera—

(Perhaps it was damaged, and has only now been repaired.)

—nor in any of the skirmishes that had taken place around Gara, or Desbadeen, or the Yeerk homeworld.

It was by far the most powerful weapon in the Yeerk arsenal, for all that it was purely defensive. The entire first fleet could rain fire down upon it for seven cycles, and not cause so much as a warm breeze inside. The Yeerks couldn’t possibly have stolen more than one, and it would be seven revolutions or more before they had the infrastructure to build their own—that they had chosen to deploy it _here,_ of all places, was confirmation of everything Elfangor had feared.

This planet—this tiny, undeveloped, backwater world—was Visser Three’s true target.

(But then where is the rest of the Yeerk fleet? Where are the massive arks, the swarming Bug fighters, the endless waves of Naharan drones?)

((Perhaps this will convince the war council, where Elfangor’s arguments could not.))

I settled in to observe, time growing like grass as I hovered invisibly to one side of the massive sphere. The Yeerk holograms were cheap and flimsy, and the cradle had no trouble penetrating them. Through the building’s transparent panels, I had an excellent view of the shape of the interior—the cavernous pool, the barracks of Hork-Bajir Controllers, the beginnings of a Naharan weapons manufactory. I watched as various Controllers passed through the field, noted the system of locks and compartments—

(It will not be possible to gas them, then.)

((No Gleet bio-filters. Important enough for their only absorption field, but _not_ important enough for basic anti-morph security?))

—began collecting data on the duties and rotations of the sentries inside. Understanding the patterns would be crucial, if I was to infiltrate without drawing attention. I had Hork-Bajir, Taxxon, and Naharan morphs, and would have no trouble acquiring—

(What had Elfangor called them?)

—no trouble acquiring a human.

I felt a tightness in my muscles, the beginnings of an ache at the base of my tail, and I triggered the cradle’s nutrient-search protocol. I would need to feed soon, or begin using up the three cycles’ worth of emergency supplies. I wasn’t looking forward to consuming the dry, insubstantial grass I had seen in my pass over the wilderness—hopefully the cradle could detect a richer source of energy nearby.

A soft chime sounded in the _eib,_ and my stalks were drawn to the fuel gauge. My journey out to the satellite had been expensive, as had been my long, atmospheric approach as I quick-scanned the other continents. The cradle wasn’t meant for sustained flight—if I wanted to maintain the option of returning to space, I had only a seventh of a cycle of fuel remaining before I would need to land and power down.

_Time to make a decision, Aximili._

I had several obvious options. I could begin preparing for guerilla warfare in the center of the infestation—acquire local morphs, gather intelligence, stay close to the pool and wait for my chance. I could investigate one of the further signs of infestation, building up knowledge and experience away from the enemy’s main strength. I could search for the necessary components to build a long-range communicator, and attempt to make contact with the war council. I could seek information about the aliens’ social structure, and try to either recruit their leaders or expose the invasion to the larger population.

But if these options were obvious to me, they would be obvious to Elfangor, and to Alloran. The Yeerks would have plans in place—contingencies, countermeasures. It needn’t even be a trap—simple competence on their part, and I could wind up captured or dead.

_Further._

I could return to the aliens in the ocean, the ones with the morphing power. Track their movements, scan their surroundings, perhaps rig together some kind of holographic disruptor from the components of the cradle. For that matter, I could look for signs of morphing power _here_ , in the Yeerk stronghold—if they had access to the _Iscafil_ device, it was extremely unlikely that they would hold back on using it.

I could try to draw the Yeerks to me—expose myself, but not in a way that would catch the attention of the entire planet. Lay a trap, catch a few Controllers, and start getting a sense of the state of the invasion’s security procedures.

_Not far enough._

I reached into the _dain,_ into the place where Elfangor’s voice lived alongside my own.  <Help me,> I whispered.

_< I cannot help you, Aximili. I cannot help you see what-I-cannot-see.>_

<But you can see the shape of the problem. What would _you_ do? >

_< Have you not already realized?>_

I hesitated. The _dain_ was never quite real—it was a shadow, an echo, a reflection. But it was also _Elfangor_ —it was a part of my mind that was not truly my own. It could know things that I did not, make connections I wasn’t capable of making.

What _would_ my brother do?

In the structure below, an alien bent over the water, as so many had done before. Two Hork-Bajir warriors stood on either side, their clawed talons gripping its arms as the Yeerk slid from its ear, as it began to struggle and scream. It fought—uselessly—and was thrown into a cage alongside the rest of its kind.

 _Know victory,_ Alloran had taught. _Know victory in every form and every shape—know its every property. If you cannot recognize it when you see it—cannot tell it apart from defeat—then you will never know which of the available paths is the true Path._

Victory was a galaxy in which the Andalites were free of the threat of Yeerk domination. Any future with that property was sufficient.

<I see,> I whispered sadly. <That is why you wouldn’t let me be your stalks-and-tail.>

_< I did not want that weight on your back, Aximili. It was not your stone to cast. Not yet.>_

<But it did not work.>

_< Apparently not.>_

I thought for a moment. If Elfangor had meant to scour the surface, wipe out all of the aliens—

<Would you have given them weapons?> I asked. <Having already failed—would you have armed them? Warned them?>

 _< I do not know, brother. I think perhaps I might have—but then, I am only _dain. _What Elfangor knew, that I do not, I can only guess. >_

I looked out through the eyes of the cradle, at the cage full of aliens. I didn’t know their body language, what the expressions of their faces meant. But I could see the violence with which they pulled at the bars that imprisoned them, the desperate effort with which they fought the Hork-Bajir who came to drag them out.

I could kill them all, perhaps. Find some process by which to empty the planet of life—a virus, or a chemical reaction, or an unconstrained self-replicator. Finish the task my brother had set out to complete.

Or I could try to help them help themselves, could give them knowledge and power, at the risk of making them even more dangerous in the event of failure.

_Further._

What else was there? I was no Ellimist.

A sudden movement in the structure below caught my attention—an interior panel flying across the open space as a pair of aliens burst through, a dense, muscular biped of a type I did not recognize carrying one of the pale climbers on its back.

In an instant, the entire chamber erupted in chaos. The biped collided with one of the climber guards, emerging with a handheld Dracon beam clutched in its fist as the Hork-Bajir began to converge on its position. A moment later, it wrapped its thick fingers around the bars to one of the cages and pulled, tearing the door off its hinges and hurling the twisted metal across the room.

Flashes of Dracon fire began to light up the room, one of them striking the alien a glancing blow. It didn’t slow down—just barreled across the room, vanishing from my line of sight for a moment before reappearing through one of the exterior doors.

Moving at top speed, the alien tore across the flat, black surface, passing through the one-way absorption field without resistance, still carrying both the climber and the weapon as it headed for the foliage. I was about to turn the cradle to follow it when I caught sight of a third alien, this one a brightly striped quadruped lounging in one of the taller plants near the structure. It dropped down to the ground just as two Controllers emerged from inside, following the first alien.

They didn’t follow it very far.

I hovered, indecisive, as the climbers in the pool chamber poured out of the broken cage and began to do battle with the guards, as the quadruped slaughtered five more Controllers outside the structure and then turned and disappeared into the undergrowth.

Behind me, the first pair of aliens dropped off the screen, having gone too far for the cradle’s sensors to distinguish them from the background heat and chaos. I ordered the cradle’s mind to track the quadruped, and the mass of climber Controllers that were now streaming out of the structure unimpeded, communicating with resonant pulses of air as they fanned out to search the area.

 _Is this a trap?_ I wondered. An illusion, designed to draw me out, trick me into revealing myself?

But I was no longer looking at a passive recording of the type a hologram might fool. The cradle’s sophisticated sensors were running at full strength, and there seemed to be no doubt—the scene unfolding before me was real.

 _It could still be a ploy,_ I cautioned myself. _A performance, for your benefit._

(To what end, though? If the Yeerks already have enough morph-capable hosts to put on a show like this—)

((Had they solved the neurocomplexity problem with lower animals?))

Still, caution was appropriate. Continuing to observe, I readied the cradle for a swift and automatic exit skyward, keying it to take over at a single, short command. Inside the structure, the chaos was already dying down, the Hork-Bajir forcing the escaped humans back into the other cages one by one. Outside, the climber Controllers were organizing themselves into a somewhat coherent pattern while the quadruped looped back around.

I recognized the tactic—simple enough to be almost laughable, but no less fundamental, for that. _Never be the hunted,_ Alloran had written. _Always be the hunter._

(Had I overlooked a possibility? Could these be Andalites somehow?)

Quietly, carefully, I brought the cradle closer to the ground, hoping to get a better angle for seeing between the densely packed trees. The first wave of Controllers had arranged themselves in a wide, semicircular arc, and a second wave was now passing through them, expanding the perimeter. I noted that, while they’d used Dracon fire inside, none of the aliens outside was carrying anything more sophisticated than directional explosives.

A quiet alert in the _eib_ drew my attention back to the quadruped, which had hunkered down in the middle of a thick tangle of plant life and was now transforming into one of the pale climbers.

(Task: confirm only one sapient species on the planet. Are they all climbers, or do some of them have a different true form?)

Drifting still lower, I maneuvered cautiously through the trees until I was directly above the thicket, then once again lowered the containment shielding on the cradle’s core. The wash of radioactive exhaust blanketed the area below, and I noted with satisfaction that the alien below had finished demorphing—this trace would last much longer than the one I had put on the other aliens, whose construct bodies would have been refactored back into zero-space when they demorphed.

I was debating whether or not to chase after the first pair of aliens—to tag them, too—when the cradle sounded another quiet alert. Glancing at the screens, I immediately understood what had caught the computer’s attention.

One of the climber Controllers in the outermost ring of searchers had broken formation—it was nearing the edge of sensor range and moving fast, about to drop off the screen. There was no sign that it had sent any messages, or that any of the other Controllers had noticed—the rest of them were still moving forward in their slow, meticulous pattern.

Intrigued, I took the cradle up above the canopy and began to follow. A moment later, the alien emerged from the forest, its skin slick and shining in the moonlight, its torso heaving as it breathed. I watched as it paused next to a grate in the ground, digging through the folds of its fabric covering. It pulled three items out of various pockets—a stunner, a communicator, and a cylinder I didn’t recognize—and dropped them into the darkness, then slid a ring from one of its fingers and discarded that too before resuming its sprint away from the Yeerk complex.

_An escapee?_

I continued to trail after the alien from a distance, keeping my stalk eyes on its progress as I turned my main eyes back to the cradle’s interface. Pulling up the sensor recordings, I began playing them in reverse at triple speed, watching as the alien backpedaled through the foliage, across the black, and back into the building. It had spoken briefly with one of the Controllers that seemed to be in a position of authority; before that, it had taken a weapon from a rack guarded by Hork-Bajir; before that, it had helped to drag several other climbers back into the cages; before that, it had wrestled with a large climber on the edge of the pool—

_Wait._

I began playing the recording forward, more slowly this time.

The two aliens were both running, both apparently using the orifices on their faces to produce sounds that the cradle hadn’t been able to pick up. They had collided—struggled briefly—

And then the one I was observing had killed the other, with a sharp, violent twist of its neck.

I reversed the recording again, watching as the other alien returned to life, as the pair of them separated. Before the struggle, the one who had died had been running around the edge of the pool, coming from the far side of the chamber—

And the one I was observing had emerged from the cage.

I began playing the recording forward again, at doublespeed. There was the struggle—the lethal movement—the gentle splash as the victor rolled his opponent’s body over the edge and into the pool, then stood up—

_Traitor._

Without any sign, without a moment’s hesitation, the alien had turned on its fellows—the others who had emerged from the cage with it. It had helped to point them out, to hunt them down—had rallied the other guards and dragged no fewer than four of its fellow slaves back into captivity with its own two hands. Then it had walked calmly over to the Hork-Bajir, requested a weapon, and joined the Controllers in the search party outside.

And once it was beyond the walls, and out of sight of the others—

I turned my main eyes away from the recording and back to the main screen that my stalk eyes had been monitoring. The alien was moving oddly, furtively—with no stalks of its own, it had to turn its whole head to look behind it or above, which it did every few steps. It was avoiding other aliens, sticking to dim-lit pathways and the narrow spaces between buildings as it cut its way through the settlement, headed for the outskirts.

I reached for the _dain._ <Brother?> I asked.

_< Watch for treachery.>_

I had already extended the cradle’s sensors as far as they would go, but I increased the sensitivity of the scanning algorithms, to alert me if _anything_ moved in the sky around me. Immediately, I received a flood of warnings, and filtered through them—nothing but avians and insects.

Below me, the alien had found a two-wheeled metal device lying on the grass in front of a small, standalone structure and had mounted it. Its legs were pumping furiously, driving the device forward down the hard, black surface of the artificial path, quadrupling its speed. The cradle matched it easily, and soon enough we were approaching another of the standalone structures, this one with a many-peaked roof and a wide assortment of plant-life.

Abandoning the machine, the alien sprinted to the door at the front of the structure and burst through it, disappearing inside. Quickly, I spun the cradle around, adjusting its position in the sky, searching for an angle that would allow me to peer in through one of the transparent panels.

By the time I located the alien again, it was crouched over another of its species—a smaller, slender specimen with longer hair and softer lines, lying unconscious on the artificial grass as red blood trickled from a wound from its head. The larger alien was searching frantically through the fabric that was draped across the other’s form, pulling out object after object. Eventually, it ceased searching and selected three of the objects—a stunner, a communicator, and a mysterious cylinder, as before—setting them aside before reaching for the other alien’s hand and pulling the ring off of its second finger.

Putting the ring together with the other objects, the alien stood and strode over to a large storage space on one side of the room, rummaging through several bins before emerging with a long, flexible cord, which it used to immobilize the smaller alien’s limbs, looping around them over and over and over again.

_That one is a Controller, too, then._

The situation was obvious enough. The smaller alien must have had some special relationship with the larger—perhaps they were family, or mates—since the larger had already proven itself willing to sacrifice others for its own freedom. Clearly, it was planning to escape, taking the smaller with it—likely to some secluded location, where it could starve the Yeerk out of its partner’s head.

Standing again, the larger alien passed out of sight, disappearing deeper into the structure. I set the cradle on an irregular loop, checking every window in a cycle as I tried to sort out my options.

The odds that this was intended as a trap for me were low, and falling. There was no reason for the Yeerks to lure me _away_ from their stronghold, even given that I would be more vulnerable once I had left the cradle.

Could the alien make good on its escape? It wasn’t clear how good the Yeerk security apparatus was. If the four objects the alien had abandoned were indeed its only links to the other Controllers, then there was a chance. It would take a while for the coalescion to notice a missing host, and if the other members of the search party were sufficiently disorganized—

(or sufficiently paranoid, such that they assumed a missing teammate meant enemy action, and not an internal escape)

—then it was mostly a matter of making it out of the immediate vicinity. If, on the other hand, someone had noticed the alien’s departure, then this was surely the first place they would check. And if they tried to raise the smaller one on a communicator, and got no response—

A sudden flash of light from inside the structure caught my attention, and I spun the cradle around just in time to see a second and a third.

Dracon fire.

The cradle was already moving, automatically heading for the best vantage point, and after a moment I could see the source of the fire—a third climber, this one not even half the size of the others, standing over the prone figure of the larger alien with a weapon in one hand and a communicator in the other. As I watched, it finished making orifice sounds into the communicator and reached into a pocket, withdrawing yet another of the mysterious cylinders. Popping it open, it crouched next to the larger alien and held the cylinder close to its ear.

There was movement—a tendril of gray, the sparkle of something wet. Slowly, a blind slug emerged from the cylinder, oozing and probing as it searched for the entryway.

_Stasis technology._

Even in the tight confines of the cradle, I felt my tail droop. The Yeerks had not had stasis technology half a revolution ago, and they had _certainly_ not had enough grubs for every Controller to carry a spare at all times. The war was changing, and it was changing _fast._

Starting a timer, I lifted the cradle high into the sky and doublechecked the cloaking field. Now was as good a time as any to start evaluating Yeerk operational security. Would they send a team to confirm that the situation was resolved? If so, would it be composed of human Controllers? Did a near-escape rate a Bug fighter?

I opened myself to the _dain_ once more, where my brother was waiting as he always had, as he always would be.

_< Have you made a decision, brother?>_

I had not. Every option seemed predictable, every consequence opaque.

_< Welcome to the universe.>_

I reviewed my options once again. Destroy the planet, arm the aliens, warn the aliens, warn the war council, destroy the pool, ally myself with the mysterious morphers.

There was something I wasn’t seeing.

_< Will you sit and wait for it, then? Pretending stone, until the decision is made for you?>_

That wasn’t what I meant.

_< And yet, that is what you have done thus far. You witnessed two aliens morphing, and you ran. You witnessed a battle at the pool, and you ran. You passed undetected past every Yeerk vessel in the system, and took no action. Even now—there are three Controllers in the structure below, and you continue to do nothing.>_

<Says the brother who locked me in a cradle and went out to face the Visser without me!> I shouted aloud, no longer content to let the _dain_ draw meaning from my thoughts.

_< Yes—I held you back from battle, then. But I am not here to hold you back now, am I?>_

Pain like a tail blade piercing my chest.

_Elfangor is gone._

_He is gone, and I am alone._

_< Yes. I am gone, Aximili. There is nothing left of me but a shadow, a scratch upon the wall. If you are waiting for someone to tell you what to do, you will wait forever.>_

I turned the cradle’s eyes downward, to the building where the aliens waited—including the alien who had killed one of his own, who had sacrificed four others for the chance to free two, and ended up a slave anyway.

_Know victory._

Three fewer Yeerks—it wasn’t victory, not in the slightest. But it would be something.

<For you, brother,> I whispered, and I pointed the cradle downward.

*        *        *

 

The chime was no longer gentle—had become, instead, a constant, annoying whine. I could have silenced it with a thought, but a part of me welcomed the distraction, was glad to have a focal point for my frustration.

I had freed the family—two mates and their offspring, each with sound-names I hadn’t bothered to remember. It had been easy. The Yeerks had not bothered to send anyone to check on them after the near escape, so I simply waited until they were all asleep and stunned them through the transparent panels.

Excising the Yeerks from their heads had been trickier, but I had managed it by adapting three of the defensive ear blocks in the survival kit, replacing the usual gate with a frequency modulator tuned to the exact characteristics of a Yeerk neuron. It had been painful, and the climbers would suffer some lasting effects, but they were free.

Unfortunately, we had been completely unable to communicate.

Correction— _I_ had been completely unable to communicate. The translator had handled _their_ stick-speak just fine, thanks to the data Elfangor had mysteriously produced when we first entered the system.

But these aliens had no _eib._ There was no place for my thoughts to go, and so my attempts to converse had led to disaster. Seizures, hallucinations, disorientation—after the third attempt, they had begged me to stop, the larger one physically shielding the others behind it, as if that would make any difference. I took on its form, thinking to speak with them after their own fashion, but that had failed, too—the translator had told me _what_ sounds to make, but not _how_ to make them. I had barely managed fourteen words before giving up in disgust.

I had hoped that setting them free would give me some sense of accomplishment, of purpose, but all it had done was highlight the enormity of the task before me. Operational security notwithstanding, the Yeerk machine was fast and efficient—with just the resources I had already seen, they could start an exponential growth cycle that would convert all seven billion humans within a single revolution. Soon, destroying the planet would be the _only_ viable option—and even that would be futile once the Yeerks managed to export a viable breeding population.

So far, the only thing preventing me from declaring defeat was the fact that they had only a single pool ship in the system, but that was confusing in its own right—every Andalite knew that the Visser was in command of a fleet of thirteen. If this _was_ his main target—and the more I observed, the more convinced I became—then where were the rest of them?

The whine of the cradle increased in frequency, and I looked once more at the fuel gauge. I had less than a forty-ninth of a cycle remaining before I was using up final reserves—reserves I would need, if I ever wanted to leave the surface under my own power. If I didn’t find the aliens soon, I was going to have to abandon the search.

I had decided to investigate the morphing connection—a second visit to the pool had turned up no evidence of morphing power among the Yeerks. It was seeming more and more likely that my brother had transferred the ability to some of the locals before dying—had possibly even left them with the _Iscafil_ device. If so, then I had allies—or at the very least, resources. It had seemed safer to search for the pair that had first drawn me up from the deep—I had clear evidence that they, at least, were not hostile, and it was dangerous to continue flying around close to the Yeerk stronghold.

But the ocean was vast, the currents uncertain, and the range of the cradle’s scanners insufficient. For ages, I had been criss-crossing back and forth across the path between the island and the pool, and thus far I had found nothing.

It was possible that they were deep below the surface, but I lacked the fuel reserves to power through the water, and so I’d simply continued my pointless search—helpless—useless—at the whim of random chance. At this point, even if I found them, I would have to abandon the cradle and swim back to shore.

I had tried to stay in touch with the _dain_ at first—to gain wisdom and perspective from the shadow of my brother. But it had been too difficult, as the hours dragged on and there was nothing to distract me from the pain of my loss. Eventually, I had silenced _dain_ and _eib_ alike, sinking deep into the _hirac_ where my thoughts could chase one another around in endless circles.

The cradle’s whine had ticked up twice more before the sensors finally detected a trace of exhaust radiation. Zeroing in on it, I saw two of the gray, rock-like swimmers, both close to the surface, their breath sending up enormous geysers of mist. On closer inspection, it was clear that the two swimmers weren’t just similar—they were identical, completely alike in every way.

Morphs.

I came in low, close to the swells, near enough that the fall would be unlikely to injure me. Taking in a breath, I gave the cradle its final instructions—to go to a specified set of coordinates and power down—and opened the hatch.

A frigid wind whipped into the tight space, bringing the blood rushing to the surface of my skin. For the first time in nearly a cycle, I felt true starlight on my face—a small, yellow sun, somewhat cooler than the one of my homeworld. I turned my stalks in all directions, taking in the blue sky, the pale clouds, the slate-gray of the horizon.

For a brief moment, I found myself reluctant to leave the cradle. It was small, uncomfortable, defenseless, and cold. But it was Andalite. It had saved my life. It had been a part of my brother’s ship.

I felt myself reaching for the _dain,_ for Elfangor’s reassuring voice, and forced myself to stop mid-thought. It seemed wrong, somehow—important, that I do this one part without help.

Pushing off the cradle with my tail, I stepped out into the emptiness.

The water was shockingly cold, and surprisingly bitter through my hooves. Keeping my stalks above the surface, I ducked my main eyes under the water.

One of the swimmers was right in front of me, its own eye within striking distance of my tail. The other was rising up from underneath, and in a few moments I was standing on my own legs atop its back, struggling to keep my balance as the waves pushed it up and down.

I felt a gentle brush across the _eib_ , a whisper of stick-speak that the translator identified as a tentative hello. I ignored it, focusing instead on the memory of the alien climber, beginning my transformation. It seemed likely that the construct would insulate the aliens from the side-effects of thought-speak, but it wasn’t worth the risk—especially not when a seizure might dump me back into the icy water.

The other swimmer surfaced and rolled, floating on the surface, watching me as the transformation neared completion, as my fur disappeared and my hooves were replaced with soft, handlike appendages. I felt the unfamiliar orifice open up in the center of my newly flattened face, felt the organs for food-grinding and vocalization emerge as my airways shifted into place.

Finally, the change was finished. Smacking my flesh-flaps together, I took in another breath and carefully formed the stick-sounds the translator had taught me. I had hoped to share my name the way it felt in my head—the call of the amphibious hunter that danced through the wetland reeds, its skin red like the rising sun. But in the end, it had proven impossible to pronounce, and I’d settled on something shorter.

“Hel,” I said, looking down at the monstrous eye. “Hel. El. Lo. Hello. My nain—my nay-muh. Namuh. My name is Ax.”

<Hi, Ax,> came the translated reply. <My name is Tobias.>


	14. Esplin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our noble adversary attempts to juggle conflicting goals against unknown enemies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: I'm not particularly happy with the final line of this chapter, and I'm thinking about crowdstorming a better one. Reviews here or discussion at r/rational if you've got a flair for pithy, evil one-liners. And, as always, I welcome your thoughts, comments, speculation, and critical feedback—the more detailed, the better.
> 
> With this installment, we close the second "book." I've got a busy couple of months, and will probably not be able to update until February (at the earliest) or April (at the latest), with the possible exception of a brief interlude that I might add over the next couple of days. Once I begin updating again, I'll hit one chapter every two weeks for another complete cycle (Jake, Marco, Rachel, Garrett, Cassie, Tobias, Ax, Esplin, assuming none of those people die before their turn comes up).

**Chapter 13: Esplin 9466**

_There will be no attack._

I sighed, the motion oddly satisfying as my human shoulders rose and fell. <So we are to play _this_ game again? > I asked, loosening my grip so that Alloran could speak more freely.

<It is no game, Yeerk. Read my thoughts—the Ellimist laughs with you.>

I looked out across the crowded cafeteria, at the teeming mass of humans talking and eating. I judged it safe to divide my attention, devoted the second layer of my mind—our mind—to the debate, keeping the rest focused.

<Only the stalks?> Alloran taunted. <You must be frightened indeed.>

It was a familiar dance between us. Alloran could not help thinking and weighing and measuring, no matter how deeply he buried himself in the _hirac_. But he could change the way he _felt_ about things—play the part of the pessimist, focus on the naiveté of my opponents, downplay the risk and the danger. And that would, in turn, make me more confident, less cautious—that much more likely to make a mistake.

It was inevitable, unavoidable. Knowledge of the flaw did not equal immunity to the flaw—I had to resort to crude heuristics, layering in extra margins of error to account for the unknown size of the bias in my thinking. And when those contingencies proved excessive, Alloran was there to sneer, reminding me of the waste and the cost, mocking me for my lack of boldness, for my unseemly caution. And thus the cycle began anew.

<It is not bravery to lower one’s tail in the face of the enemy,> I quoted. <Wise elders grow fat on the grass of dead fools’ graves.>

I felt the twinge of Alloran’s dissatisfaction and magnified the feeling, drawing out the hormones in a subtle, delicious mélange. On the surface, one of the other children asked me a question, and I dug through my human brain for understanding, assembling an appropriate response. Of the eight sitting closest to me, three were Controlled, but it was yet too early to drop the charade.

<Besides,> I continued, mocking. <They are led by the great Elfangor, scourge of the thirteen waters, fire in the infinite dark—the Beast, the Vanarx, the blade that falls without warning. What caution could _possibly_ be too great, when facing such a foe? >

Alloran’s dissatisfaction turned sour, and I laughed out loud, ignoring the confusion of the humans around me. We had traced _that_ argument seven times over and seven times again, each of us defending first one side, then the other, as Alloran swung from earnest optimism to black despair and back to sly deception.

<He may yet live,> Alloran said stubbornly. <It is conceivable that the Elfangor you defeated was a double. The fight _was_ disappointing. >

<Elfangor strayed far from the Path,> I said, <but never _that_ far. Even _you_ did not think to break the injunction until Seerow opened your eyes. >

<And yet he is a faster learner than I.>

<Was.> I watched as the human girl, Rachel, entered the cafeteria and collected her food. Around me, two of the Controllers pivoted noticeably, and I marked them down for chastisement as Alloran oozed contempt. Until we knew who the human morphers were—or at least how many—there was no room for loose discipline. <The incident on the road—the warning to the Chapman family—the speech at the pool—these are not the work of a competent strategist.>

<Unless the competent strategist must first convince you that he does not exist,> Alloran pointed out. <For all that the efforts were crude, the results were—interesting.>

I felt a surge of annoyance, mirrored as always by the glow of Alloran’s amusement. _Interesting._ First the unexpected suicide of Hedrick Chapman en route to his extraction, then the unfathomably incompetent bungling of the Withers cover-up as idiot underlings blindly followed containment protocols instead of having the presence of mind to take a little initiative or at least _ask for confirmation before taking irrevocable action—_

<Feeling a little pressure, are we, Yeerk? Two of your most strategically placed hosts rendered useless, and the debacle at the pool on top of that. One wonders what the Council of Thirteen will think. If, that is, you ever manage to reestablish contact—>

<As you say,> I interrupted, drawing an icy calm around my anger as I forced Alloran back beneath the surface. <Fortunately, I have a _master_ strategist on _my_ side, and a plan that will serve in either case. >

The Andalite warrior responded with a silent flash of disdain, smothered almost before it came into being, and I sent a reflexive wave of pleasure in response, eliciting an echo of frustrated rage.

Though he tried valiantly to hide it, there was no finer barometer for arrogance than Alloran, veteran as he was of a long career of outperforming overconfident fools. I had long since learned to use his scorn as a check on my own conceit, his skepticism serving as a trigger for strategic review. Forcing my eyes to drift casually across the room—

(One of the child Controllers was now sitting next to the human Rachel, the pair of them engaged in casual conversation.)

((I felt naked without my stalks, blind and clumsy and exposed, and made a mental resolution to spend more time in morph.))

—I turned the second highest layer of my attention to an appraisal of the situation.

The human Rachel was indeed morph-capable; I had received final confirmation earlier in the day, thanks to the Naharan mass-wave mappers I had quietly installed around the school. She had spent the morning sneaking through the building in various forms, searching—presumably—for signs of technology, evidence of infestation, strategic and tactical intel.

Her presence was both a hazard and an opportunity. We had accelerated our timetable in response to the breach at the pool; barring a direct order from me, the operation would begin during the final hour of the school day. If she could be taken before then—taken without warning, and in such a way as to prevent her confederates from noticing—it would not only mean the end of any meaningful resistance on Earth, but also the end of the Andalite monopoly on morphing power.

(Dividing my attention still further, I opened another pair of eyes and scanned the displays, confirming the continued absence of any other mass anomalies. Whatever confederates she had within the building, they had thus far refrained from morphing.)

((That she _did_ have confederates was practically a foregone conclusion. She would not be present at all unless the resistance intended some form of assault or disruption, and the incident at the pool had proven that Elfangor had conscripted at least two. Given the amount of time he had spent on the surface, the original number could have been as high as forty-nine, and if he had indeed left the _Iscafil_ device, the upper bound was now somewhere in the hundreds.))

In the best case, I could capture the device itself, though should my assumption that the resistance had it prove false—or should one of them initiate its self-destruct—I would settle for additional test subjects. But that would require taking her soon, and without arousing the suspicion of my own subordinates. Thus far, I had managed to keep the evidence of human morphers from spreading throughout the invasion force, but I could not maintain the secret forever, and not at all if the operation began and this Rachel or her confederates took overt action.

(It occurred to me that she _might_ be alone if her mission was one of sabotage or espionage—she could be here to destroy the school entirely, or to observe and report before making her own escape. I made a note to compile a list of inexpensive means by which human children might create large explosions or poisonous reactions—thus far, there were no signs that the resistance had access to high technology of any kind, save the morphing power and the single Dracon beam they had managed to steal from the pool.)

_She might also be here out of sheer force of habit. Operating on autopilot, maintaining cover, failing to question her normal patterns and assumptions._

I tightened my grip, forcing Alloran back below the surface, no longer amused by his subtle manipulations. I did not—as yet—have an adequate model of my human opponents, but it would be optimistic in the extreme to assume they were _that_ incompetent. They _knew_ that the school was one of my primary targets; surely they wouldn’t risk death and capture without _some_ clear purpose in mind.

_They may not all know. There could be more than one group, with mutually exclusive objectives or poor communication._

I lashed out again, this time more on principle than from actual irritation. It was an interesting possibility, and one I had not previously considered.

(Across the cafeteria, the child Controller was still engaged in conversation with the human Rachel. I considered ordering him away, but decided against it; the feeding period would be ending soon enough, and there was still some value in keeping my own presence hidden from the rest of the operation.)

I had been working under the assumption that the Beast had conscripted a single social group—a few careful questions had revealed that children of Rachel’s age often used that particular swath of territory as a shortcut, and the overlap between Melissa Chapman and Cassie Withers _had_ proven to be the correct place to look. But the overall distribution needn’t be symmetrical around those two, and given the potential for recruitment over the intervening cycles, there could easily be multiple factions by now.

I shifted in my seat as I considered the possible ramifications, taking comfort in the weight of the various weapons and devices hidden beneath my artificial skin.

(What I wouldn’t give for _stalks._ )

Opening another set of eyes, I scanned the census map, noting with satisfaction that pairs of my personal agents had concealed themselves at each of the locations the human Rachel had previously used to morph and demorph. With my own hands, I began tapping out one of the preset dexterity sequences, and was pleased with the response—the fog and lag from the previous field test had been greatly reduced, but there had been some concern that the link would decay with time.

Somewhere inside my head, Alloran laughed.

I let out a breath. It made no difference—we were well-prepared for forty-nine coordinated morph-capable attackers, and we were just as prepared for forty-nine attackers in strategic disarray. The school was a near-perfect killing field, already isolated by outlying grass and tar and further protected by the reworked absorption field, bifurcated and inverted with additional projectors for holograms and for suppressing human electromagnetic communications. Outside, Controllers in positions of authority were on standby, ready to draw public attention toward any of three separate distractions in other parts of the city. Of the thousand or so humans within the perimeter, roughly a tenth were already Controlled, and every member of that tenth had been thoroughly briefed and was at least hypothetically prepared for any of seven contingencies ranging from a publicity breach to a full-scale Andalite attack. There were four Bug fighters in the air nearby, each with a full complement of human Controllers in local military uniforms, and my own modified fighter could be summoned remotely and would arrive within seconds. Even without my direct intervention, we had all of the elements necessary for a swift, easy victory.

And if I could not _quite_ manage to secure the _Iscafil_ device—if the human Rachel could only lead me to _some_ of her confederates, and not all—if the coalescion learned of the presence of morph-capable humans, and that I had known, and had hidden the information—

Well. Those contingencies, too, had been accounted for. The key was not to choose a single path to victory, but to bend _every_ path toward the goal. Some routes were simply longer than—

I froze, ice-cold shock and sudden, vindictive glee rising in equal measure beneath the surface of my thoughts.

_No._

Abandoning pretense, I sprang to my feet and jumped up onto the table, peering openly across the crowded space.

Gone—the human Rachel and the child Controller both. Gone without warning, while my eyes were elsewhere—gone without the slightest trace.

_Have fun, Yeerk._

Top priority—containment. I thumbed the control in my pocket, ignoring the human children tugging on my artificial skin, the adult Controllers striding toward me with artificial sternness in their eyes. “Aftran,” I declared, the words projecting themselves into the ears of every Controller in the school. “Awaken. This is your Visser.”

(A part of me noted the sudden reorganization of my priorities, the swiftness with which I had abandoned secrecy and subtlety, and began searching for the source of the intuition even as the rest of me moved forward with the sense that time was of the essence.)

The teachers stopped abruptly in their tracks, their eyes widening. A blue halo emerged around my forehead, visible to all from my place atop the table, identifying me to those who hadn’t seen my lips moving.

“Activate the absorption field and cut off all human communications _now._ Teams of four—assemble at the doors to the cafeteria and the doors at either end of the hallway outside. Teams of two in front of every door in that hallway and at each openable window in this room. Maintain physical contact with the doors and windows; keep them closed.”

(Holograms—it had to be holograms. _Movable_ holograms, _personal_ holograms.)

Around me, every adult and a significant number of children had leapt to their feet and were running to comply as the rest of the humans looked on in confusion.

_Too slow._

If they could vanish from sight in an instant, then they could open and close a door unseen. I visualized the paths, the angles, the expanding cone of their possible positions—

No good. They would have made it out of the net easily, assuming they hadn’t simply hunkered down inside, disguised as a table or an empty patch of floor. And by now the human Rachel would have had time to morph, if indeed she hadn’t been morphed _already_ , hiding behind a hologram the entire time—

(And what of the child Controller? A traitor? An impostor? An illusion all along?)

((Was the human Rachel even _here?))_

(((I _wanted_ that technology.)))

“Cancel previous order,” I commanded, and the Controllers running toward the edges of the room slowed and stopped, those already there relaxing as they lowered their arms.

(I would have to trust the absorption field to keep Elfangor’s children contained—if they could penetrate _that_ , we had a much more serious problem anyway.)

“Begin the operation—contingency three.”

Around me, the cafeteria erupted with the sound of stunners and Dracon beams, quickly joined by the screams of those who had escaped the first salvo. Contingency three allowed for reasonable violence in the service of maximum speed, relying on the communications blanket and the exterior holograms to protect us from exposure. By the time I stepped down from the table, all of the unarmed humans in the room were unconscious, slumped in their seats or sprawled across the floor.

“Hold!” I called out, as Controllers around the room drew stasis cylinders from their bags and pockets.

Holograms. _Personal_ _holograms._ I had no idea what the limitations of such a technology might be, but I could at least _try_ to address the possibility of infiltrators.

“Exchange a cylinder with the nearest Controller to you in each of two directions, then walk at least thirteen paces away from either of them.”

They complied, uncomprehending but obedient. I waited for a cry of confusion, for someone to shout that their cylinder had turned incorporeal and vanished.

Nothing.

“Again, with two other Controllers this time.”

Once more, nothing.

“Again.”

Nothing. I sighed. It didn’t even begin to scratch the surface—the holograms could have a range greater than thirteen paces, or the impostors might have been numerous enough to “exchange” only with one another, or they might have been disguised as fallen students, or as furniture, or they might all be long gone—

“There may be infiltrators,” I said, toggling the control in my pocket to include Controllers throughout the school. “Andalite bandits in morph, or human collaborators with some kind of personal holograms. Infest the unconscious humans, stun them for an additional twenty minutes, and then gather together. The highest ranking officer among you will offer four identifying passwords, then stun the rest of you, then its own host.”

I toggled the control once more, putting the four Bug fighters on high alert in case I needed physical reinforcements, and turned, striding toward the table where the human Rachel had been—allegedly—sitting. I withdrew my portable Naharan scanner and checked for unusual radiation, then opened the Arn crucible and set it on the table, counting slowly in my head.

No reaction.

Opening a distant pair of eyes, I scrolled back through the mass-wave recordings. The data were noisy and difficult to read—it was far simpler to track _changes_ in the wave than to make sense of it as it existed at any given moment—but even so, the event was easy to spot. One moment, there were two masses where I was standing, and the next, there were none.

I felt a strange crawling sensation in my esophagus, a squirming heat that rose through my chest and caused my forehead to burn.

_Teleportation?_

I watched the recording again, slowing it down as much as possible. The transition was swift, comprising only four slices of data. The two masses vanished without changing in volume, their densities fading to zero in four even steps.

Was that how teleportation would work? I didn’t know.

Beneath the surface, Alloran had abandoned his usual hostility and was alive with curiosity, his sense wary and watchful.

I played the recording again.

(If they could teleport—)

I played the recording again.

(If they could teleport, then why wasn’t the war already over?)

I felt the tension in my human body ease slightly, felt a fractional relaxation in the part of me that was Alloran as I played the recording yet again.

If they could teleport, the war would already be over. They could simply move the contents of the Yeerk pool into a desert, or out into space, could drop toxins or explosives directly into the complex and have done.

If, on the other hand, it was part of a hologram—

Thus far, we had acquired three kinds of holograms. Those manufactured by the Skrit Na were adequate, but cheap—easy to produce and maintain, they were little more than thin sheets of shaped light.

Naharan holograms were far superior, though much more difficult to create and repair. Built atop force field technology, they could be made as solid as metal alloys, with a variety of textures and the ability to both block and produce sound. They required tremendous amounts of power, though, and the generators were bulky and fragile, useless except in permanent installations.

Andalite holograms couldn’t mimic solid structures, but they _could_ update in real time, making them ideal for shipboard cloaking devices. Like the Naharan ones, their generators were too large for portable, personal use, but they were significantly more efficient. We didn’t have many; most of them had been salvaged from space wreckage and installed in stealth fighters and flagships.

If holograms could be made to cancel and mimic electromagnetic radiation, and could also fool tactile and auditory senses, it was at least plausible that they could be made to create _gravitic_ illusions, as well—

(I could feel Alloran’s growing conviction, coupled with the usual bitter fury as I used his genius to check my intuitions. Andalite antigrav technology was young, but full of promise—in theory, such subtle manipulation was only forty-nine revolutions in the future. And it was a sane explanation, in its fundamental assumptions—if a given race of aliens had any sort of grav-sensitive organ, then its holograms would _need_ to mask and alter mass waves, just as Andalite holograms masked and altered light waves.)

 _But then_ —

As always, Alloran tried to hide, and as always, I seized him by the tail, dragging his thoughts up to the conscious level where I could examine them.

_But then why isn’t the war already over? That level of hologram isn’t as powerful as a teleporter, but it’s still sufficient to fool Andalite security technology, let alone anything the Yeerks have cobbled together…_

Irrelevant, at least on the timescales that mattered for the current crisis. The war was _not_ over, and the absorption field had gone up almost immediately.

They were still inside.

I rechecked the census map. There was no movement anywhere except for the cafeteria, where the blip that represented my own human body moved toward the door and out into the hall.

Where would they go? It was unlikely that they were here to destroy the school, or they wouldn’t have revealed themselves, giving away the element of surprise—

(For that matter, why _had_ they revealed themselves? It was the same mistake they had made with the Chapmans, and intelligent opponents did not make the same mistakes twice—)

((I updated my estimate of the humans’ incompetence accordingly, ignoring Alloran’s quiet amusement.))

Possibility: they were heading for the perimeter, having somehow intuited the danger they were in. Assessment: glow.

Possibility: they were heading for the absorption field generator, either because they had known it was there all along or because they had extrapolated its location after attempting to escape and discovering the barrier. Assessment: gleam.

Possibility: they were heading for _me—_

Planting myself in the center of the hallway, I drew the Ongachic snare from one of the pockets in my artificial skin and activated it. With a soft hum, the device powered up, a slight ripple distorting my field of view as it polarized the air molecules around me. I adjusted the frequency until I stood within a sphere of invisible, outward-pointing spikes, then resumed my analysis.

I could direct the Bug fighters to flood the hallways with gas, or to blanket the campus with a wide-beam stun discharge, but there was every reason to suspect that their technology would brush off such an attack with ease. I could simply wait, and hope that they would reveal themselves—

Alloran sneered.

Fine. _Would_ they be able to penetrate the absorption field? If they did, would we even be able to detect it?

As if the thought had been a magical spell, my communicator beeped. “Visser,” came the human voice, taut with stress. “We just detected a massive energy surge in the northeast corner of the property, at ground level. We think they were trying to push through. It didn’t last long, and the field integrity was not compromised.”

“Be on alert for similar surges,” I said. “The next time you detect one, the nearest ship is to fire on its exact location, and the other three are to fire in an arc just behind it, deeper within the field. Full power.”

(I wanted the technology intact, if I could get it, but a broken prototype was better than nothing at all.)

So. They had tried to escape—on foot, apparently. Where would they go next?

_The generator._

I glanced at the empty hallway around me. There was no way to tell if any of them were present, lurking behind an illusion, waiting for the right moment to strike—

But that moment had long since come and gone. If they had intended to kill me, I would already be dead. Squaring my shoulders, I deactivated the Ongachic snare and tucked it back into my pocket.

Turning, I began to jog through the hallways, swerving around the slumped bodies of stunned humans.

How _many_ of them were there? The human Rachel was the only one the Naharan mass-wave mappers had detected morphing, but if they could mask gravitic signals, then they could easily be present in force—

— _fool_ —

—of course. If they were present in force, the operation would never have succeeded, and it _had_ succeeded. Even a full publicity breach would not change the fact that the invasion had just effectively doubled in size.

No, the simplest explanation was that there were only two of them—the human Rachel, and the false Controller. Somehow, they must have realized they'd been discovered, opted for a fast and risky extraction.

“Bring the Bug fighters down to ground level,” I said, breathing heavily as my host body broke into a sweat. “Remain cloaked, and come as close as you can to the school. Overlap your deflectors to create an auxiliary barrier just outside of the absorption field.”

If _I_ were up against an inverted absorption field, my first move would be to try undoing the inversion, returning it to the default out-but-not-in configuration—or better yet, I would try to program some kind of conditional, such that the reversal would happen just as I reached the boundary, providing my enemies with no warning.

Together, Alloran and I could accomplish such a task in a seventh of a seventh of a cycle. For a human, the process would take much, much longer.

For an unknown enemy capable of inventing near-magical hologram technology—

I grimaced, turning the corner to the central office and letting myself in. My options were growing increasingly narrow; even if I was correct about their target, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to find or hinder them—not when they could disappear into thin air. What I needed was the Leeran hypersight, but that would allow _them_ to see _me_ , too—

“Visser! The field has inverted!”

I froze, my hand a bladelength away from the handle of the only door leading in to where the generator stood. They had reprogrammed the system in _seconds_ —were they still inside? Had they already slipped past me?

— _useless delay—_

Pulling a gas canister out of my pocket, I removed the pin, counted to three, and then yanked open the door, tossing the already-hissing cylinder inside. I slammed the door shut again immediately, locking it, and turned to run back down the hallway toward the exit. The field was almost equidistant in every direction—if I were the enemy, which way would I choose—

(Opening another set of eyes, I dropped the shielding on the inner chamber of my modified fighter and set it on a parabolic course that would bring it within range for the briefest of moments—)

Bursting out into the sunlight, I turned toward the southwest corner of the school, opposite the point where they had first attempted to pass through the field, my human body quivering with exertion. It was a wild guess, vastly more likely to be wrong than right, but in a few seconds, they would be off the property, and it wouldn’t take them long to bypass the Bug fighters—the slimmest of chances was still better than _nothing_ —

Silent, unseen, my fighter passed by overhead, and suddenly the universe unfolded.

It was reality itself, the veil of perspective torn and tossed aside, every line of consequence and interaction laid bare in a flood of naked perception. I could see everything— _everything_ , an infinite collection of infinities, all there was to see within the tiny space that was my immediate vicinity. I was aware of the minds of the humans around me, and of the Yeerks who held them in intimate embrace; could see the shape of their thoughts against the background of time and space itself. I heard the symphony of a trillion trillion trillion quarks, the crystalline hum as possibility shivered itself into parallel truths, as the present died and became the past, and the future was born into the present.

And in the foreground, I caught a shattered glimpse—

—a thousand images—

—a girl, a robot—

—a human body, motionless by a fire—

—a planet burning as a black god laughed—

—resolve as cold and hard as a spacecraft hull—

—confusion giving way to utter dismay—

—and then the infinite instant ended, the Leeran body moving back out of range, and I knew that they were _right there_ , almost within reach, Rachel Berenson suddenly visible as the hologram stretched across the absorption field, sparked, and died—Rachel, wearing the body of my nemesis Elfangor, and six-three-four-eight-one, anonym Erek King, who had never been a Controller, who was over twenty-six thousand revolutions old and who was even now pressing up against the absorption field from the outside, compelled by ancient directives deep within his programming to _try_ , even though he _knew_ it was too late to do anything, knew that he had been played, manipulated, tricked—

Before I could move, before I could breathe, before I could even _think_ , the tail blade of Rachel’s Andalite body lashed out, and both of my arms fell to the grass, my human jaw dropping open in shock. A third swipe cleaved into my thigh at an awkward angle, and I tumbled to the grass, blood already surging to soak the grass around me.

<I’d take a little longer to enjoy this, Yeerk,> snarled Rachel—daughter of Dan and Naomi, cousin of Jake, friend of Melissa, who had burned herself thirty-seven times in the past three days, who had never forgiven herself for forgetting to feed her pet gerbil when she was seven. <But.>

My lips moved soundlessly as she raised her tail blade once again, the thought unfinished. Her eyes narrowed, her body tensed, her tail whipped forward—

*        *        *

 

I dragged my main eyes open, the motion like lifting a corpse as the neurons fired past a Z-space link that no longer led anywhere. Around me, the walls of my private chamber blurred into existence, slowly sharpening as the fog began to lift.

That had _hurt._

<Report,> I commanded in thought speak, my nerves too sluggish and unresponsive for my usual hand signs.

“We fired on the human,” said the image of the wing commander, “but it must have been wearing some kind of personal shield—the shots had no effect, even at full power. It—ah—it disappeared after the first salvo, but not—it wasn’t vaporized, sir. It—it just vanished.”

<And the girl?>

“Sir?”

<The Andalite.>

“It disappeared back into the school, out of sight. We presume it must have morphed into some small animal and escaped.”

<You _presume_ —>

“We’ve been firing on as many birds, insects, and small mammals as possible, sir, but our hit rate is only sixty-eight percent, and we aren’t equipped to detect anything moving under the ground. There’s an animal called a mole—”

<Pull the fighters back,> I interrupted. <Resume written operational procedure as soon as enough of the hosts are awake. I want the first wave ready to board as soon as their parents have been converted.>

“Yes, Visser.”

I attempted to open one of my other sets of eyes, and found that I could not. The link was gone, broken beyond repair. <Dispatch the retrieval team to fetch the head,> I said. <Bring it to the laboratory.>

“It’s already on its way, Visser.”

I rose from my couch, my motions unsteady but rapidly improving. I would need to send a different team to recover the other five bodies, all of which had almost surely died when the link abruptly failed. The Arn would want to examine them all—brains and conduits alike—in preparation for the next round of cloning. Two or three more iterations, and we would be ready for the third phase.

_So. You have a new enemy._

Opening the refrigerated compartment, I withdrew one of the small, disclike packages and removed the foil wrapping. Breaking it into quarters, I set each piece at a different corner of the large rectangle painted on the floor. Stepping on top of them, I felt an anticipatory thrill as my hooves began to pulverize and absorb the stringy substance.

<Yes,> I said thoughtfully, relinquishing my hold on Alloran so that he could speak freely once again.

<And yet you intend to continue exactly as before.>

I closed my eyes, feeling the Yeerk-flesh slide up my legs and into my stomach. <Not exactly,> I said, and I lowered the barrier still further, allowing Alloran a glimpse into my own thoughts.

_1417 Bayview Drive._

_88E South Church Street._

_209 Aspen Avenue._

_3555 Franklin Court._

_The playground at Magnuson park._

<They will know that you are coming,> Alloran said, and I laughed at the flicker of hope in his thoughts—so pale, so weak, so easily extinguished.

<For all the good it will do them,> I said. <If they run, we shall simply spread unchallenged. And if they stay—>

My meal complete, I turned toward the sanitation unit, forcing the Andalite warrior prince to look upon his own body—upon _my_ body.

<Well. At least it will be interesting.>


	15. Interlude 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story resumes on March 1st. I will update every two weeks (or every ten days if I can swing it), and will complete a full cycle before going on hiatus again.
> 
> I have a Patreon now. It is https://www.patreon.com/Sabien, if you are interested.

**Interlude**

 

On a cold, heavy world, an alien runs—runs at the snail’s pace that is the fastest anything can move through an atmosphere as thick as quicksand. It is pursued by seven creatures with cracked, black skin like cooled lava—they howl, and the alien stumbles. It trips over a root, a living tendril that has been growing for a thousand years, that was made to grow for exactly this purpose—trips, and falls, and dies soon after, pierced through by needlelike claws.

This is allowed, by the rules of the game.

The seven creatures drink in the memory of the hunt, and their thousand thousand brethren chitter in satisfaction. They have learned a new way to kill, and it is wrong, subtly wrong—their enemy has fallen more easily than it should have, and their confidence is unfounded, tainted by hubris.

This is allowed, by the rules of the game.

The creatures depart from the surface, returning to their ship, and their ship darts away from the massive star, slipping into the white non-space that lies between and behind the usual empty blackness. It travels for a distanceless time, emerging into reality just as a pulse of radiation sweeps through the void, the violent echo of an explosion half a hundred parsecs hence. Their shields are adequate, and they barely notice, but a cascading chain of tiny reactions causes a wire to shift and a valve to close, sparks the formation of a scattering of new isotopes in the mixture of their fuel. Their ship is fractionally faster, though they do not know it; they will arrive at their destination sooner than expected, and at their next destination sooner still, the changes compounding until the day when they land on _this_ continent instead of _that_ one, because _that_ one is on the far side of the planet, and the creatures are not patient.

This, too, is allowed by the rules of the game. There are a trillion trillion pieces, and all of them significant, their interactions governed by a shifting web of causality as delicate as a neutrino and as old as time itself. The web may be touched—nudged—shifted—once in an epoch, or possibly twice, a single strand may be snapped. Any more than that, and the game is forfeit. The players dance in slow infinity, calculating the fractal geometry of self-fulfilling prophecies, anticipating the impact of anticipated acts, and acting in reaction to events far in the unfixed future. Thus do cause, effect, and chaos mix, until even all-seeing eyes begin to miss things. There is always error, after all, and it is a chief characteristic of error that it is _random_ —it being reliably willing to cancel itself out, it may safely be ignored. One can only go so many places beyond the decimal point before one is wasting resources more wisely spent elsewhere—a waste one’s opponent will spot, and convert into advantage in accordance with the rules.

And so—things happen. They are outside of the realm of prophecy, beyond the reach of fate. They are not allowed by the rules of the game, and neither are they forbidden.

An alien speaks a word as it dies. The word is heard only by its enemies—they do not speak the language, and they pay it no mind.

A lump of rock falls into a star. The star explodes, as it would have anyway—the fire peaks a tenth of a degree hotter on a scale measured in the hundreds of billions.

On Earth, a girl is born. Her name is Rachel, and she is not supposed to be there.


	16. Jake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note: I now have a Patreon at patreon dot com slash sabien. If you've enjoyed reading r!Animorphs and feel like sponsoring an interesting project, please consider pledging. Your money won't actually go toward this story (which I'll continue writing even if no one pledges), but instead toward funding a rationality/epistemology/worldsaving bootcamp for middle and high schoolers, which I am currently developing based on my experience in related fields.
> 
> As always, please note that I am eager for feedback of all kinds! There's excellent discussion over at r/rational, and I'll read every comment posted here. Your responses are the fuel that makes this fun.

**Chapter 14: Jake**

I was asleep.

I knew that I was asleep, because I was beginning to wake up. Before that, I hadn’t been asleep at all. I had been—

Gone.

Slowly—slowly—the fog and darkness receded, giving way to shattered chaos. It was as if I were seeing through things, into things—like I could see the front and back and top and bottom and inside of every thing, all at once. There was light, and pain, and confusion, as if a hundred dreams were each competing for my attention.

And then—

I felt a twist—

A spasm—

The vision changed. The thousand fragments shifted, turned, flashes of the deepest black showing in the spaces between. One by one, the colors dissolved, leaving only emptiness.

And then I saw it.

A creature. Or a machine. Some combination of both. It had no arms. It sat still, as if unable to move, on a throne that was miles high. Its head was a single eye, monstrously large, shot through with bloody veins.

It turned, slowly—left, then right.

Watching.

Watching.

I trembled. No body, no mind, no sense of time or space, and still I trembled, praying that it wouldn’t notice me, wouldn’t look my way.

But that’s not how nightmares work.

It saw me.

It saw me.

It saw me, and—somehow—it laughed.

*        *        *

 

“Wait—did that _work?”_

“Jake! Can you hear us?”

“Garrett—go get Marco! Run!”

I opened my eyes easily, like I’d gotten exactly the right amount of sleep. I was lying flat on my back on warm ground, pine needles poking through my shirt. Around me were familiar faces—Rachel, Tobias, a boy I recognized from school named Ethan or Eric or something—all looking down at me with concerned expressions. I heard a rustling above my head and craned my neck, squinting as Cassie moved in front of the sun, casting me into shadow. She was smiling, her jaw trembling, her eyes bright with tears.

“Hi, Jake,” she said softly.

“Hi,” I answered back, and a look of relief washed across her face, spreading to Rachel and Tobias in turn. “Why—um. Why am I on the ground?”

“You were—asleep,” Rachel said, her tone a sort of hospital calm.

“A coma, actually,” said the boy from school. “For eight days.”

I felt my eyes go wide with shock. “I see,” I said slowly, my thoughts churning into overdrive. “Is—um—is this one of those times where I shouldn’t try to sit up?”

“No, you should be fine,” said the boy. Eric, I was pretty sure. “We’ve been keeping your muscles stimulated. You may have some pins and needles, but otherwise—”

_“Jake!”_

I heard a staccato crashing, the sound of feet tearing through leaves, and propped myself up just in time to see Marco come barreling out of the woods a few dozen yards away.

For a moment, I thought he was going to run right into me, but he skidded to a stop just outside the circle, as if held back by a force field. His face was scratched and dirty, a dingy rag wrapped around his right hand. He looked down at me, then around at the others, his jaw tight. His eyes lingered on Tobias for an extra heartbeat, and Tobias shrugged microscopically.

_What’s going—_

_Shut up. Wait._

“Jake,” Marco said suddenly. “Your name is Jake?”

My jaw dropped open for a moment before my brain caught up. _Coma._ _Makes sense to check._ “Jake Berenson,” I answered, trying to sound nonchalant. “I live at 88E South Church Street. I’m in ninth grade. And you’re Marco. And—um—Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T?”

That should have produced a smile, but Marco’s jaw remained tight. “Where’s the Yeerk pool?” he asked.

I blinked. “What?”

The tightness became a twist as Marco’s lip curled, a shadow of something dark falling across his expression. “What’s an Andalite, Jake?”

I opened my mouth, and the words caught in my throat.

You know how sometimes you’ll have something rough going on—problems at school, or a family member who’s sick, or some big mistake you just made that’s got all your friends mad at you—and for a few minutes after you wake up, it’s like everything’s fine?

“Alien,” I said, my voice suddenly hoarse. “Blue fur, looks like a centaur scorpion. Elfangor. He gave us the morphing power, told us about th—”

I broke off as Marco dropped to his knees and pulled me up and into a hug, squeezing me so tightly I thought my ribs might crack. He was crying, silently, his tears hot as they dropped onto the back of my neck. I hugged him back reflexively, bewildered, looking back and forth between the faces of the other kids standing around me.

“It’s been a long week,” Tobias murmured, as Marco’s body continued to shake. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

*        *        *

 

“So you don’t remember _any_ of it?”

I shook my head. “Nothing at all after Tobias left.”

“That settles it,” Marco said flatly. “There’s no other explanation.”

I looked around the circle, at the six of them sitting in the middle of the forest clearing. My best friend, my cousin, my crush. Tobias, and his orphan buddy Garrett. Erek—the ancient, six-limbed, pacifist android who’d woken me up—had already left, saying something about nonviolence and councils of war.

And then there was Ax. Elfangor’s younger brother—a cadet in the Andalite military, practically the same age as us—whom Tobias and Garrett had rescued from the bottom of the Pacific ocean. He was in human morph—a strange combination of the two boys and a man he’d acquired elsewhere—and had said almost nothing in the hour we’d been talking.

They were dirty, sweaty, and tired, all of them—their voices hollow, their expressions bleak. They’d filled me in on the past few days with curt, emotionless summaries—the disaster at the pool, the takeover of the high school, the frantic scramble to escape after the Visser’s unexplained psychic probe blew everyone’s cover. All of our families had been taken, all of our obvious avenues of escape cut off—if it hadn’t been for the Chee’s holograms and the fact that neither Rachel nor Erek had known about Cassie’s secret valley, they would never have made it.

And it hadn’t helped that they’d had to carry my useless body every step of the way. I wasn’t certain, but it felt like none of them would look me in the eye.

“It is—unsettling,” said Ax, a very human agitation visible on his face. “Ing. Ling. This will cause problems among my people. It is—taboo. Is this the right word? Taboo?”

I had no memory of anything since the previous Monday, ten days earlier—a full day before we’d discovered self-morphing. Cassie’s theory was that the gap was due to the difference between short- and long-term memory—that I couldn’t remember anything that hadn’t already been permanently encoded into my neural structure when I acquired my own genetic template.

“How could they not already know?” Marco demanded, his tone one of barely restrained hostility. “It’s— _obvious._ ”

I had gone into the Yeerk pool with Marco. I had stayed too long in morph, and the pocket dimension that had held my body in stasis had collapsed, taking me along with it. I had died, disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a construct.

Me.

“It is unthinkable,” Ax countered. “Un. Think. Kah. Like the place at the base of one’s stalks—place base—very easy to not-see. And the norphing techolo—tech _nology_ is new. Recent. It is used only by the nilitary, and even then only lee lee _lee_ by sip spesh suh-pesh-al operatives. The new class of cadets, ink ink including myself, have been given the ability but are forbidden to use it excet excep except during closely supervised training— _ing_ —or in high emergencies.”

I wasn’t real. I was a duplicate, a copy, a throwaway clone. I existed because the real Jake Berenson, in his panic, had wished for a body that wasn’t broken and dying, wasn’t half-eaten by alien monsters, and had frantically, desperately, blindly morphed into a backup version of himself, wishing only to be whole again. I was the product of stupidity, cowardice, and sheer, dumb luck.

It was all a little much to take in. It _felt_ like I’d gone to sleep on Monday night, and woken up in the middle of a nightmare.

“Any other helpful shit you people just never bothered to think of?” Marco snapped. “’Cause as far as I can tell, it’s you assholes _not thinking_ that got the rest of us into this mess in the first place.”

“Easy, Marco,” Rachel warned, her voice low and heavy. “Same side.”

Marco rolled his eyes, his lip twisting into a sneer, but he said nothing further. Across the circle, Ax shifted uncomfortably.

It turned out that Elfangor’s brief history lesson had left out a few important points—points which Cassie had filled the rest of us in on, and Ax had reluctantly confirmed. Like the fact that it had been Seerow, the brilliant Andalite scientist, who first gave the Yeerks access to high technology, making it possible for them to kidnap Alloran and launch their war. Or the fact that it had been that same Seerow who had developed the morphing technology, a slow and painstaking process that had taken him decades of work.

Or the fact that that work had hit a dead-end and been stalled for years, until the discovery—and subsequent study—of the Yeerk species.

Tobias had been the first one to put the pieces together, and Erek had confirmed it, using some kind of X-ray vision to scan the inside of my skull while I was still comatose. There was extra tissue there—a lot of it. Interspersed with my neurons, interfering with the normal functioning of my cerebrum even as it slowly decayed and died. Tissue that responded to signals at very particular Z-space frequencies, until Erek burned it away.

Yeerk tissue.

It made sense, really. You could stash a body in hyperspace, and you could build a new one in its place, but you needed something to _link_ the two—to allow one to control the other. And lo and behold, there was one species that did exactly that—that had evolved over millennia to be able to integrate with and control _any_ bioelectric neural tissue, regardless of size, species, or complexity. Yeerk biology was the key, the last link in the chain, the source of Seerow’s final breakthrough. With artificial Yeerk tissue integrated into every morph, control was as easy as thought itself.

“So the Andalite people literally don’t know,” Tobias mused. “Gonna be one hell of a PR shitstorm once it gets out.”

Rachel shrugged. “Fighting fire with fire,” she said. “Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”

“No,” Ax broke in, his fingers anxiously clenching and unclenching, sweat beading on his brow. “It is far more sigit sigif _sig-nif-i-cant_ than that. It is our highest rule, our most sacred tradition. For every—you do not have an adequate word—mind, pattern, spirit, crystal—for every thing-that-knows-itself, there is exactly one—one place, one role, one equal opportunity to sway the course of history. Ree. To make _two_ is to—to—”

He fell silent, his eyes darting around the circle. “We—Andalites—we share the _eib,_ ” he said. “It is a common resource, a space for all. If one voice becomes twice as loud—do you see? It cannot stand. It is the end of—of _balance._ ”

“This from the guy who’s carrying around a carbon copy of his brother in his brain,” Marco grumbled.

“ _No,”_ Ax repeated. “A picture is a rep repreez _rep-re-sen-ta-tion_. Like your stick-speak mouth sounds. _A word is not a thing._ The _dain_ is a tribute, an honoring. It is precious—private. It does not and could not ever replace the true being. Beeng. Bing.”

Replace. Like the way I had somehow replaced myself, with myself. I looked down at my hands—which were exactly the same as they’d always been, down to the scar from the time I’d slammed my fingers in the car door when I was eleven—and shivered.

I felt like me. That either made it better, or much, much worse.

“Do we care?” Tobias wondered aloud. “I mean—not to shit on your religion, Ax, but we _are_ in the middle of a war, here.”

“You are not list—”

“The interference!” Garrett blurted out, cutting the alien off mid-sentence.

We all turned to look at him, and he visibly blanched, dropping his eyes to the dirt and pulling up the neck of his shirt to cover his mouth. Tobias leaned over and murmured something, and he seemed to brace himself, taking in a deep breath before continuing half-masked.

“Tobias and I thought there was a problem with morphing the same animal at the same time,” he said. “But we both morphed the whale and the squid with no problem. It was only the hawk.”

“What about it?” Cassie asked.

“I acquired the hawk _from Tobias._ ”

There was a long silence as we all digested this. “Holy shit,” Marco breathed.

“Wait,” Rachel said. “What—”

“Recursion,” Marco explained. “Whatever scanning is going on when we acquire something, it’s exact, down to the cellular level. Maybe even molecular. It has to be, otherwise Jake and Elfangor wouldn’t have complete personalities, with memories and everything. Which means that if there’s Yeerk tissue inside every morph—”

“—then when you acquire _from_ a morph, the scan’s going to pick _that_ up, too,” Rachel finished, her eyes going wide as she caught on.

“And that tissue is—what, attuned?—to whatever signal is coming from Tobias’s brain, off in hyperspace,” Marco continued. “So when Tobias and Garrett are both morphed into the same hawk, and Tobias goes to flap his wings—”

“It’s not like that,” Tobias cut in. “It’s more like—like static. I wasn’t in control of Garrett’s body; it just screwed up the signal and made him all twitchy and spastic.”

“Controls on top of controls,” Marco said. “But all operating on the same principles, so they interfere with one another.”

“Does this mean if we acquire a Controller, we get the Yeerk inside?” Rachel asked.

“No,” Ax answered impatiently, still fidgeting. “Unlikely. Like lee. The _Iscafil_ process—is-kuh-fill—distinishes between native and foreign tissue. Shoe. It would ignore a true Yeerk. The tissue inside a construct, though, is built from the organism’s own zown pattern—it needs to be genetic etic etically compatible, to prevent the body’s immune system from attacking it tack tack tack tack tack. It would naturally blend in more thoroughly, making it harder for the morphing technology to dis-sting-guish-shit.”

“Still, though,” Rachel said. “It means that we can mine memories from any person we acquire. Skills. Intel. We can copy people’s personalities _exactly—_ ”

“No, we _can’t,_ ” Cassie said hotly. “Aren’t you _listening?_ Just look at Jake! It’s not some kind of fake program under there, it’s a _real person._ When we morph into Elfangor, he’s _really under there_ —trapped—screaming—enslaved.”

There was another long, uncomfortable silence, during which it seemed that Ax was too distressed to form actual words.

“I don’t think so,” I said, speaking up for the first time in minutes. _They didn’t flinch. You’re imagining things._ “Not quite. I mean—I don’t have any memories of the tunnel, of the—”

_The real Jake._

“—of the mission. I’d still have those, right? Like, if I’d been conscious, underneath. I’d remember it.”

“Elfangor was plenty conscious,” Cassie countered, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Ax wince as though he’d been punched. “He almost killed himself—me—when I first let him loose. He thought he’d been captured—thought I was a Yeerk.” She shot a baleful glare at Rachel. “I didn’t realize he was _right._ ”

“Yeah, but you—I dunno—woke him up?” Tobias cut in, drawing Cassie’s attention away as Rachel squared her shoulders, her face flushing red. “I mean, maybe whatever’s muting the person underneath isn’t just keeping them quiet. Maybe it’s keeping them _off.”_

“Oh, great,” Cassie said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Much better. We’re not enslaving sapient beings, we’re just keeping them drugged and sedated while we dig through their memories and steal their identities.” She looked around the circle. “Am I seriously the only one here who’s _bothered_ by this?”

“No,” Ax said immediately, his own voice cold and hard with resolve. He stood up. “It is forbidden. The entire technology is not of the Path. It will be unmade, when the knowledge reaches my people. I do not wish to interfere with your battle, but I must ask that you no longer use my brother’s body. Zmy. Zbody. I must ask it, and you must agree and obey.”

“ _Obey?”_ Rachel hissed, even as Cassie nodded in satisfaction. “Who do you think—”

She broke off midsentence as Ax raised his hand, revealing a small, dark device that was unmistakably a weapon.

Instantly, the mood changed, a sort of bristling tension sweeping around the circle. Marco went very still, and Tobias shifted half a step, putting himself ever so slightly in front of Garrett. Rachel’s jaw clicked shut, and Cassie’s gaped open.

“Jake,” whispered Marco, so quietly that I almost couldn’t hear it over the sudden roar of blood in my ears.

Time slowed. I felt the part of my brain that knew how to deal with this sort of thing rev up—felt it lose traction—watched, helpless, as it skidded uselessly into confusion. Another part of me began to shout, demanding that I do something, _anything._

_Come on Jake this is your job you’re supposed to save them you’re supposed to be good at this fearless leader—_

“Ax,” Tobias began, his voice soft and calm. “What—”

“No, Tobias,” the alien said, raising the weapon an inch. It remained trained on Rachel, whose lips were white and bloodless, her nostrils flaring with each breath.

— _what’s the matter Jake don’t you know what to do Jake are you choking Jake did you freeze are you scared where’d you go Jake just a clone Jake you’re dead and you’re a fake Jake—_

“You do not know the _eib,_ ” Ax said, every syllable careful and crisp. “You do not hear, and you can not understand. It is—I do not know this word, rape, but it is the word the translator is telling me to say, that you rape the memory of my brother and you _must not continue.”_

_—fake Jake fake—_

“Jake,” Marco whispered again, quiet and desperate, and just like that, the skidding stopped and my brain suddenly found purchase, opening up Marco’s single word and unpacking the complete entreaty within. _Jake, man, I don’t know what’s going on inside your head, but if you’ve got any of that Professor X magic up your sleeve, now’s the time to pull it out._

In front of me, Ax shifted his stance, the weapon slowly tracing its way around the circle as he pointed it at each of us in turn. Inside my head, the black box was on maximum overdrive, assembling data faster than my conscious mind could follow.

_Taboo cadet forbidden sacred tradition balance eib path obey—_

“I do not wish to—”

“Cadet,” I called out, the rest of the circle flinching as the alien’s finger twitched. “You will point that weapon at _me._ ”

— _little and less of war, seven billion human Controllers—_

_—purchase a small victory with my death—_

I rose to my feet, acting on intuition, feeling the slightest, the very smallest possible amount of relief as the weapon turned away from Rachel, swinging around to track me.

— _spent several years in human form—_

_—much knowledge, and yet little wisdom—_

“I know little of Andalite custom,” I said, allowing my voice to drop into the more formal register that Elfangor had seemed to favor. “But somehow I suspect that junior warriors waving weapons at war councils is not a part of your ‘path.’ Am I wrong?”

The alien’s eyes narrowed, and he cocked his head a fraction of a degree, saying nothing.

— _this body will be one of your primary weapons—_

_—use it to hide your identity from the Yeerks—_

“No answer?” I blustered. “Then perhaps you’ll—”

— _hand over that weapon—_

_—no, too soon, he’ll double down—_

“—answer another question instead: is it customary for young Andalites to override the dying wishes of their elder brothers? Is it yours to say what should be done with Elfangor’s—”

_—pattern—_

“—pattern?” I took a step forward, entering the circle. Ax’s knuckles whitened on the grip of his weapon, but again he said nothing. “For it is _his_ will that we use his body, as a weapon against the Yeerks. Those were his—”

— _last words—_

_—no, wait, orders—_

“—final orders, to us, when he—”

— _recruited—_

_—deputized—_

“—mobilized us as the primary arm of resistance on Earth.” _Authority. Legitimacy. I’m your superior officer, and you have Made A Mistake, Cadet._

“He did not know that—”

“ _He would not care,”_ I snapped, cutting across the alien’s slow, deliberate speech. “He was ready to sacrifice seven billion minds to stem the Yeerk tide. Do you think he would hold himself to any less a standard?”

I took another step, pressing my advantage. It was bullshit—pure, frantic, Shakespearean bullshit, but it was working, or at least not- _not_ -working. I wasn’t sure how far I could trust my read of Ax’s human body language, but he seemed to be radiating uncertainty, indecision. I could see it in his jaw, his eyebrows, the set of his shoulders—a dozen tiny signs that told the black box inside my brain to _keep going._

“You do not understand,” Ax said, his tone softer but still with steel at its core. “Your minds are not—”

“By all means, dismiss us,” I interrupted, changing directions as I tried to keep him off-balance. “I’m sure that our _inferiority_ will be a great comfort to your people as they face down seven billion human Controllers.”

I took yet another step, pausing just outside of arm’s reach, the alien gun mere inches away from where my heart was trying to beat its way out of my chest. I was out of my depth, free-falling, making it up as I went along and hoping the house of cards would hold together.

“You doom him to the very fate we fight to prevent—”

“And would he not go to that fate willingly, if it meant victory for the rest of your people?” I demanded. “Would _you_ not go to that fate willingly, cadet? Do you think you can win a war without sacrifices?”

— _sacrifices—_

The word echoed in my head, setting off a subtle ping in the back of my mind, a reminder that Ax was not the only skeptic I needed to satisfy. Hoisting an expression of disdain onto my face, I turned away from him, ignoring the gun at my back as I locked eyes with Cassie—Cassie, whose parents had been murdered by the Yeerks, who the real Jake Berenson had decided to keep in the dark while he focused on infiltrating the pool, whose face was a trembling mixture of fear, fury, and confusion.

_Don’t say anything yet Cassie please just trust me wait please wait one thing at a time—_

“We would not do this lightly,” I said, trying to convey a wordless plea even as I kept my tone level and firm. “Were it not the whole wo—the whole _galaxy_ at stake. But we’re already on the path to defeat. We can’t afford to lay aside _any_ weapon.”

— _come on Cassie please I know this isn’t right just play along don’t say anything about Nazis or waterboarding or slippery slopes—_

She bit her lip, glaring, her eyes cold and full of threat. But she nodded.

‹This is _not_ over, Jake.›

I covered my surprise—barely—remembering just in time that self-morphing was a thing— _fake Jake fake Jake—_ that of course the others would have started shifting into their armor the second Ax pulled out a gun. Marco and Rachel had probably already been wearing theirs, secret valley or no secret valley.

Sending a silent thanks to Cassie, I turned back toward the Andalite, saw the arm holding the weapon tremble slightly— _where was he hiding that thing, anyway?—_ saw him swallow visibly.

“Which weighs heavier, cadet?” I asked, my instincts still pushing me toward stiff, formal sentences. “Tradition, or your brother’s will? Already he broke with your people when he gave us the morphing power, armed us with the knowledge of the Yeerk invasion. Elfangor’s Trust, he said—he feared your people might someday call it the third great mistake of the war. But he did it anyway. How much do you trust his wisdom? What is he saying to you right now, in your own head—in the _dain?”_

“It is not for the _dain_ to make decisions on behalf of true minds,” Ax growled, his frown deepening.

“Then ask the real Elfangor,” suggested Garrett.

There followed a long, _long_ silence. I stayed with it, keeping my eyes locked on the Andalite’s, watching the play of emotions on his human face. He looked at me—at Cassie—at Rachel—all the while keeping the weapon pointed squarely at my chest. He looked at Tobias, and down at the ground, and up at the sky.

 _Think about it,_ I urged him silently, wishing I still had access to thought-speak. _He’s still in there, somehow, preserved by the morphing tech. He’s still real, still_ alive.

_You have a chance to say goodbye._

“Like the wind in thought and deed,” Ax murmured cryptically, his attention still turned inward.

I remained silent. Behind me, I heard Marco shift, and I lifted a finger, hoping that he would understand, and wait—hoping that waiting was, in fact, the right move.

— _fake Jake fake Jake fake Jake—_

_Shut up. Focus._

It occurred to me, as the moment stretched onward, that we didn’t just have the power to bring Elfangor back for an hour—we had the power to bring him back _forever._    That one of us could stay in morph, and trade—could make a deal with Death—

Ax looked at me.

Trusting my instincts, I stretched out a hand, palm up. “The weapon, cadet,” I said. Calmly. Quietly. As if obedience were a foregone conclusion.

He handed it over.

“Your oath,” I added. “That there will be no more threats of this kind, for any reason.” I glanced around the circle, my gaze lingering on Tobias, on Cassie, on Rachel. “We are too few to fight amongst ourselves. We don’t have to be allies, but we _can not afford_ to be enemies.”

The Andalite nodded.

“We will discuss this,” he said, as the tension slowly began draining out of the circle. “My brother and I, together.” He began to demorph, fur sprouting across his olive skin. “In the _eib,_ in private.”

I nodded as gravely as I could, looked around the circle again. “Cassie?” I asked, cautious. As of yet, no one else had tried deactivating the built-in morph controls. “Are you willing to—um—facilitate?”

She turned to look at Ax, then back to me, her eyes glittering. “I could just lie, you know,” she said loudly. “Dig through his mind and say whatever I feel like. You’d never know. _Ax_ would never know. That’s the kind of power we’re talking about here. When I was—when we were— _talking_ —it was—I was in total control. I had access to anything I wanted. His thoughts. His memories. His emotions. He couldn’t even _think_ unless I wanted him to. Absolute power. It is _absolutely guaranteed_ to be corrupting.”

 _Fate of the galaxy,_ I wanted to say.

But I didn’t have to. Cassie already knew. And because she knew, she’d play along. I was sure of it, my black box quietly confident. She would make the argument, say her piece, and then concede, because we _were_ losing, and we _did_ need every advantage we could get, and whatever else she might be, she wasn’t blind or stupid.

Which made it all the more terrifying that she was almost definitely right.

*        *        *

 

When it was all over, Ax stalked out into the forest without saying a word. We heard the dull _thunk_ of bone against wood, the crash of trees falling, the unsettling silence where a human would be shouting, screaming, sobbing.

Cassie—Elfangor—turned to me, all four eyes focused and motionless in a way that I somehow knew was intended as a sign of respect and attention. ‹He does not trust you, Jake Berenson. Not yet.›

I nodded. “I know,” I replied. “Can we trust him?”

‹He will not betray you to the Yeerks, nor break his promise and threaten you directly. But beyond that, I cannot say. You have not done either of us any favors today. This discovery—I feel that I should have known it, that I had all of the pieces, and so the pain of it is bearable. But Aximili is young. He is—›

The alien paused as a particularly loud crash echoed out of the forest, a dozen birds screeching skyward as the ground shook underfoot. ‹He is alone,› Elfangor continued. ‹Solitude is—not normal, for an Andalite. The _eib—_ it is a soothing presence. An embrace, of sorts. It bolsters us, guides us, reassures us—it is a stabilizing force, surrounding us from the moment of our birth until the rite of starlight, when we enter adulthood. Aximili—›

He broke off again, dropping to all sixes, his tail drooping as his main eyes turned toward the ground and only his stalk eyes remained fixed on mine. ‹He should not have snuck aboard my ship,› the alien said, a note of despair in his thought-speak. ‹He should not be alone, at this stage of maturity. He is too young, and I do not know what pressures his isolation will create. It is—do you know of the human scientist Harlow? The experiments with rhesus monkeys, some decades ago?›

I shook my head. “Cassie, if any of us—”

‹Yes. Cassie knows. There is danger here.›

Pushing off with his hands, the alien straightened again, lifting his torso and looking at each of us in turn. ‹I would ask that you care for him,› he said. ‹Tobias, I think, in particular, and Garrett as well—he has begun to know and respect you, as he does not yet know and respect the others. But it may be hopeless, and in any event you have more pressing matters to attend to.›

Another crash, another flight of birds. Wordlessly, Tobias stood, pulling Garrett to his feet. Together, the pair of them disappeared into the woods.

‹There is much assistance I could offer you,› Elfangor continued. ‹Intelligence. History. Tactics. Certain technologies you may be able to assemble using human components. And yet—›

He hesitated, glancing once more at Rachel and Marco before focusing on me. ‹I cannot prosecute this war for you,› he said bluntly. ‹There are forces at work which I cannot oppose and cannot explain—forces which prevented me from remaining with you in the first place, and which may forbid or punish my continued presence or influence. I think that you must consider me a resource in only the direst need, and call upon me only as a last resort.›

“No,” Marco cut in. “No, no, no. This is the second time you’ve pulled this ‘mysterious deeper game’ crap on us, Mr. Fangor. Last time, you didn’t have a chance to explain, but this time—”

He broke off, looking at his old, plastic Mickey Mouse watch. They’d all thrown out their phones days ago, on the far side of town, to keep the Yeerks off their trail.

“—this time, you’ve got like forty minutes before Cassie needs to demorph. Explain.”

‹I cannot,› Elfangor repeated. ‹The rules of this game are unclear to me, and the consequences of violating them graver than you can imagine. You will have to piece together what you can from what I have already told you—any more, and Crayak will have leave to—›

He faltered, stiffening in what appeared to be surprise. ‹Crayak,› he said again, slowly and deliberately. ‹Crayak. Crayak.›  He paused, seeming to gather his resolve, and I felt a tingle of dread crawl its way up my spine. ‹Ellimist.›

“What—”

‹The game has already changed,› Elfangor said grimly. ‹It was not possible, when last we met, for me to say those names to you. I do not know if this was a stricture that was tied to my true body alone, or if the reasons for withholding them no longer apply, or if one side has acted unilaterally to loosen my restraints, or if we are baited into a trap of some kind, or—›

He trailed off again, turning his stalk eyes to Marco while his main eyes remained on me. ‹I will say only this: that we are each of us here by design, moved into place as surely as a pawn upon a chessboard. That I did not tell you this before—that I find myself moved to tell you now—that the true nature of the morphing technology has given us the chance to have a second conversation at all—each of these events were plotted, predicted. They are steps in a calculation, branches on the tree of possibility, and it takes a greater mind than mine to see the final outcome.›

“God _dammit,”_ Marco bit out. “What are we supposed to _do_ with that?”

‹Your best,› said the alien, giving an eerily human shrug. ‹As you would have done anyway.›

*        *        *

 

“Should we even have a fire going?” I asked. “The Yeerks have got to be using some kind of satellite surveillance to look for us, at this point.”

It was almost night, the sky a deep blue broken by a scattering of bright stars. Rachel, Tobias, and Garrett had gone to sleep—Rachel in her hammock, and Tobias and Garrett in one of the three tiny lean-tos. Ax had disappeared hours earlier, after promising to rejoin us in the morning. Only Cassie, Marco, and I were still up, sitting on logs around the firepit in the middle of the clearing.

“Erek set up a web of holograms around the entire valley,” Cassie said. “He wouldn’t tell us where they were, or how they worked, but he says that nothing in the valley can be seen from the outside, and that the holograms themselves can’t be detected by the Yeerks.”

“That’s—convenient,” I said, watching the column of smoke as it trailed off into the heavens. _Would the smoke itself be enough to give us away? Would Erek have thought of that?_

Marco muttered something under his breath. “What?” I asked.

“I said, it doesn’t make any sense. The Chee.”

“What do you mean?”

“Erek told us they have some kind of block against violence,” he said. “Can’t do anything to harm another sapient being, can’t allow violence to happen. But he’s sheltering us even though he _knows_ we’re going to be taking the fight to the Yeerks. And he’s letting the Yeerks go around bodysnatching people left and right. And he said they’ve been on Earth for thousands of years, but obviously they’ve never intervened in any large-scale war, since it would take all of about six of them to completely shut down any battlefield in history. I can’t figure out any kind of coherent set of rules that makes all that fit together.”

He fell silent, staring into the fire, the orange light shining in his eyes, off his hair. He was in his real body, his right hand swollen beneath the dirty fabric of a t-shirt torn into strips.

I looked over at Cassie. She was staring into the fire, too—elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her hands, wearing the same closed, thoughtful expression she’d had on ever since she came out of Andalite morph.

I sighed, feeling the dull throb of a headache beginning to blossom between my eyes, and added _figure out what to do about the Chee_ to the long and growing list of things-to-do-tomorrow. Standing up, I grabbed another of the logs Rachel had cut— _how?_ —and dropped it into the pit, shielding my eyes from the resulting fountain of sparks.

We had food, water, and shelter, thanks to Cassie’s original efforts and occasional supply runs supplemented by deliveries from Erek. We had weapons—the laser beam Marco had stolen from the Yeerk pool, a few guns Tobias had “scavenged” from the pawn shops on the north side of the tracks, the gun Ax had pulled on me and the strange metal bracelet Rachel had stolen from Visser Three’s body. We didn’t have internet or phones, but we had thought-speak, and it wasn’t too hard to get news from Somerton, Rosita, or Granite Heights, none of which showed any signs of infestation yet.

We had everything we needed to survive. What we didn’t have—yet—was a way to _win._

I turned and sat back down, gazing into the flickering light. The last time I’d sat in front of a campfire had been almost two years ago, backpacking with Marco and my parents and my brother Tom. We’d cooked steaks on sticks, made s’mores, thrown copper sulfate on the flames to turn them green. It had been pretty much the only time I’d gotten to hang out with Tom that summer, since he’d been spending every day getting ready for JV basketball tryouts…

Tom was out there somewhere, right at that very moment. Trapped. Scared. Alone. Controlled. Tom, and my parents, and my cousins Jordan and Sara and my aunt and uncle—Rachel’s parents—and Marco’s dad, and everyone I knew from school, and probably a quarter of the people in the city, by this point. Twenty thousand host-ready Yeerks, Elfangor had said.

I hadn’t thought about any of them all day. In days, really—even before my memory went fuzzy, I’d been avoiding looking straight at the problem. At what had happened to the Withers and the Chapmans, the utter, horrifying darkness of it. It was so much easier to focus on what was right in front of me, on asking questions and making plans. To distract myself from the fact that I was lost, homesick, and terrified, and that I didn’t know what to do next.

— _fake Jake fake Jake fake Jake—_

Except that wasn’t it. Not really. The problem wasn’t that I was a fake Jake, it was that I was exactly the same as the real Jake. The Jake who’d screwed up and gotten himself killed—who hadn’t been able to save Cassie’s parents—who was barely holding the group together. I had every one of his flaws, every one of his weaknesses. I wasn’t a superhero, I was a _kid_ , and not even a particularly smart one at that. I had no business carrying the fate of the world on my shoulders.

 _So give it up. Turn yourself in to the military, give the blue box to the scientists, alert the media. Like you_ should _have done_ last _week._

Insanity was doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting something different. Or was that despair talking? The part of me that was afraid to be in charge, because then it was all my fault?

I sighed again. There was no point going around in circles inside my own head, in trying to make decisions by myself in the dark. The universe had waited eight days while I was stuck in a coma; it could wait eight more hours.

I rose to my feet, my eyes still on the flames. “I think I’m going to b—” I began, then faltered as I looked up.

Marco and Cassie were staring at one another across the campfire, each looking quietly determined. “What—” I said, and then broke off again. “Are you guys thought-speaking at each other?”

Marco held up his broken hand in answer. “Gotta spend _some_ time in my real body, or this will never heal.”

Cassie said nothing.

“What’s going—I mean, what are you—” I asked, for once unable to guess.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Marco drawled. “We’re both waiting up to be the last one to talk to you. Alone.” His lip twisted into a smirk, his eyes still locked onto Cassie’s. “Though I guess at this point, it’s pretty obvious which one of us is more stubborn.”

Suddenly, he stood, kicking a splash of dust into the fire as he shoved his hands into his pockets, breaking eye contact with Cassie as he threw me a plastic grin. “’Night, buddy. Glad you’re not dead, and all that.” He turned and began walking off into the darkness.

“Marco?”

“Later,” he called over his shoulder.

And then he was gone. I stared after him for a long moment, trying to figure out what had just happened. Behind me, there was a slight scrape, a quiet rustle, and I turned to see Cassie looking down at the ground, scratching random lines in the dirt with her shoe.

“He didn’t take it very well,” she said simply, her voice calm and conversational. “When you—went under. He was—”

She pursed her lips. “Well. It’s been hard. Let’s just leave it at that.”

I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. “Cassie, I’m sorry about your—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said, cutting me off. Her eyes were incredibly bright in the firelight, set into the dark skin of her face. They shone like stars, looking brilliant and distant.

“Yeah, but we should’ve—”

“ _Should_ you?” she asked. She looked up at me, her expression mild. “Because now you’re looking at it from the outside, and I’m curious. What do you _really_ think, Jake?”

I swallowed again, turning to look at the dark space where Marco had disappeared.

Should I have left Cassie in the dark about her parents’ death? It was unkind, for sure—cruel, even. But would it have been any kinder to tell her? To waste time and resources hunting her down, only to deliver the terrible news?

If we’d gone looking—if we’d waited—the whole mission to the pool would have turned out differently. If we’d sent Rachel to find Cassie, and Marco and I had gone in alone—

“That’s what I thought,” Cassie said sadly. “See, _this_ is the problem. It’s not that we’re going to make a whole bunch of bad calls and suddenly turn evil or something like that. It’s just that the _good_ calls—well, there just aren’t any good calls, you know? We keep going like this, we’re going to end up in a place where even the least bad option is still something we’re not going to be able to live with. And if we _do_ live with it, it’ll be because _we_ —because we’ve stopped—because the good parts inside us—”

She faltered, scrubbing at her eyes with one hand. “I killed a bear, Jake,” she said. “Right over there, by the creek. Morphed into Elfangor’s body and just killed it, straight out. It pissed me off, so I ended it. And you know what? I don’t even think that’s particularly crazy. I mean, I can look at it and see, okay, I’ve got some kind of PTSD thing going on, and I felt like I didn’t have any control over my environment, so I did something to give myself a sense of power and—and _agency._ And it’s just a bear. It’s not like I killed a _person_ or anything.”

The lump in my throat had grown too big to swallow. I felt my fists clenching and unclenching, felt sweat trickling down the back of my neck. I wanted to say something to stop her—to throw the train of thought off the tracks before it could reach its destination—but there was nothing to be said. Nothing _true,_ anyway.

“Rachel—she killed a _kid_ , Jake. She didn’t want to talk about it, but I got the story out of Erek. At the school, when everything was going down, Visser Three was in a kid’s body, and she just carved it up like it was a Thanksgiving turkey. She cut his arms off, and then knocked him down, and then cut his head off, and then she just _dealt_ with it, like it was _nothing._ And you know what else? Erek had it all on tape, and I watched it, and as soon as I saw it was a kid I didn’t know, I felt _better._ Like it would have been worse if it were a friend of mine, like this kid’s life didn’t _matter_ because I didn’t know his _name._ ”

She looked up at me from her seat on the rotting log, barely two yards away and yet infinitely out of reach. “I talked to Elfangor about the whole Yeerk-morphing thing. At the same time that he was talking to Ax—he can think two things at once, easy. And he made this point, you know, about respect and stuff. Like, if I think that _I_ would want somebody to use _my_ body—if it could help them win the war—then I’m not really respecting them if I assume that _they_ would say no. Like, I’m sort of accusing them of being selfish or short-sighted or something—that if the war is really worth fighting, then I should trust other people to _see_ that it’s really worth fighting, and just go ahead and assume that they _would_ consent, if they had the time to really understand. And it wasn’t even until I demorphed that I realized just how deeply creepy that sounds, and _even then_ I still believed the argument. I still think it’s true.”

She shrugged, a quick and casual movement of her shoulders, and I felt the tension inside me double, because she shouldn’t be this nonchalant, not Cassie of all people, not about things like _this_. My black box was shuddering, smoking, ready to break because this was _wrong, wrong, wrong—_

“And that’s the thing, you know? That’s what I’m afraid of. Not that we’ll wake up one day and realize that we’ve crossed all the lines, but that we’ll look back and we won’t even _see_ any lines—that we won’t know what all the fuss was about in the first place, because every choice we made was good, every choice we made was _justified._ I mean, what was Rachel supposed to do—leave Visser Three in control of the battlefield?” She gave a brittle, humorless laugh. “I did that once, and now both my parents are dead. If I’d done what Rachel did, my dad might still be alive right now.”

“Cassie—” I interjected, her name like glass in my throat.

“Yeah?” she asked—carelessly curious, heartbreakingly casual.

But once again, there was nothing to be said. The silence stretched out and eventually broke, becoming just an ordinary quiet. After a time, Cassie stood, still looking slightly up at me, the flames reflecting in her eyes imperceptibly dimmer as the fire slowly burned itself out. She looked at me, and smiled—sadly—then shuffled forward, leaning in to brush her lips against mine for the first time.

“Sweet dreams, Jake,” she said, as she stepped around me and headed for bed. “I’m glad you’re back.”

*        *        *

 

For the third time in a row, I stretched out my hand and focused, watching Cassie’s borrowed body go still as the acquiring process took hold.

“Last one for now,” I said, drawing back as she began to demorph. “I don’t want you getting morph-sick.”

‹That’s only three,› she pointed out in public thought-speak. ‹Are you sure?›

“For now,” I repeated wearily. “We need to move on. Lot of stuff to sort out.”

I stepped away as her feathers began to melt together, slowly darkening into the deep purple of her t-shirt. Turning, I picked up the _Iscafil_ device and handed it back to Rachel. “Hold on to this,” I said. “We’ll figure out what to do with it later.”

She nodded, her face an unreadable mask. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the small, blue box, her eyes locked on it as if it were a poisonous snake.

After Visser Three had done whatever-it-was that had put the two of them and Erek into some kind of mind-meld, she’d gone straight for the construction site, digging the box out of its hiding place and delivering it to Marco before going to rescue her own family. By the time she’d gotten home, the Yeerks were already there.

 _Later,_ I told myself. _You’ll deal with it later._

“Sound off,” I said, turning to the rest of the group. “Flight morphs.”

“Osprey,” said Marco.

“Barn owl,” said Garrett.

“Red-tail,” said Tobias.

“Eagle,” said Rachel.

There was a mental flash, the image of a great horned owl, and Ax lifted a hand. He had been practicing thought-speaking at human brains just as much as he had been practicing human speech, but he still found it easier to communicate in pictures and concepts rather than words.

“Snipe,” said Cassie, as her mouth appeared out of the peregrine falcon’s beak.

“And I’ll take the falcon,” I said.

Since most of our morphs had been acquired from Cassie, we’d decided to divide them up between us, so that there would be no chance of accidental interference in the middle of combat. For the most part, the birds had been independently acquired and could be overlapped, but Garrett, Ax, and I were all using borrowed morphs, so we’d each claimed one of them, as well. It would make it easier for us to tell one another apart in the air, and we always had the option of acquiring our own copies of different birds later.

“We’re going to look like a birdwatcher’s wet dream when we’re all flying together,” Marco quipped. “We’ll need to be careful—stay spaced out and stuff.”

“Bulldozer morphs,” I continued, refusing to be distracted.

“Elephant,” answered Rachel.

“Polar bear,” added Garrett.

Ax transmitted the image of a moose.

“Gorilla,” said Marco.

“Cape buffalo,” said Tobias.

“And Cassie and I will share the rhino, for now,” I concluded. “Okay. Combat. I’ve got the tiger.”

“Gorilla again,” Marco chimed in. “Ain’t broke.”

“Wolf,” Cassie said softly.

‹My own body will be sufficient,› said Ax, his thought-speak only a _little_ bit like razor blades dancing across our minds.

Garrett was the first to recover. “Ouch,” he said. “And, grizzly.”

“I’ll play Elfangor,” said Tobias. I suppressed the urge to study Ax’s reaction.

“Hork-Bajir,” said Rachel.

I raised an eyebrow— _when did_ that _happen?—_ but she didn’t elaborate, just looked down at the cube in her hands.

I took in a deep breath. _Later._ I would deal with it later, along with Ax’s alien dogma and Tobias’s continued skepticism and Marco’s increasing irritability and Cassie’s quiet despair and Garrett’s weird tics and the fact that we were all stuck out in the woods and all of our friends and family had been taken and I was a fake a clone a copy a ghost—

Later.

“Okay,” I said, and I was relieved that no hint of my exhaustion and anxiety managed to make its way into my voice. “Let’s make a plan.”

 

*        *        *

 

“It works,” Marco said, holding out both hands like a stage magician. Slowly, his palms began to swell, bulging outward, taking on new colors and texture. A minute and a half later, and two reusable grocery bags dropped to the forest floor, their contents spilling out across the pine needles.

“Cassie was right,” he continued. “I didn’t have to think about what was _in_ the bags; I just focused on the outside, and it pulled the whole thing into the morph.”

“It’s going to cut down on your time limit,” Rachel said. “Right? I mean, if the thing is based on mass—”

“Yeah, but hand grenades don’t weigh much, and neither do AK-47s.”

 

*        *        *

 

“When Cassie returns, you may tell her that her prediction was correct,” said Ax. “The pigeon was capable of detecting wavelengths of light well beyond the range of both human and Andalite vision.”

“There’s a cloaked Bug fighter over your house, Rachel’s house, and Marco’s house,” Garrett added. “You can’t really _see_ them, even in morph, but you can tell they’re there. Nothing over Oak Landing, and nothing over Cassie’s. One over the school, though, and the big force field is still there. Sorry, Jake—I don’t think we’re going to be getting anybody’s family out any time soon.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Took them maybe three minutes to show up after Rachel stung him. They’re getting faster, and they’re following up on _everything_ now. I think they’ve got every single cop, EMT, and firefighter, not to mention most of the people who work downtown. Pretty soon, we’re not going to be able to move around in the city at all.”

“Did you get the cylinder?”

“Yeah, we got it.”

 

*        *        *

 

“I can’t help you,” Erek said. “I _want_ to, believe me. But I can’t.” He unzipped his backpack, revealing the groceries inside. “This is the best I can do, for now.”

“What about the rest of your people?” I asked.

“We’re still gathering, just in case. But there’s nothing we can do. Our understanding of psychological trauma is _learned_ —as far as our core programming is concerned, the Yeerk invasion is a _good_ thing. Crime is down by fifty percent and still falling. Pretty soon, there won’t be any violence left at all.”

 

*        *        *

 

I closed my eyes. “Five seconds,” I called out, focusing my thoughts. _Twenty-three times forty-seven—that’s twenty-three times fifty minus twenty-three times three; twenty-three times one hundred is twenty-three hundred, cut that in half and it’s—_

‹JOHHHHHHHN JACOB JINGLEHEIMER SCHMIDT—HIS NAME IS MY NAME TOOOOOO! WHENEVER WE GO OUT, THE PEOPLE ALWAYS SHOUT—›

“Stop!” I managed to choke out, my train of thought utterly derailed. “Please, stop!”

‹Did it work?›

“Yeah,” I said, unable to keep a smile from spreading across my face. “It worked.”

 

*        *        *

 

‹I still don’t understand why Cassie’s the only one of us who can pull this off,› Marco grumbled.

‹Doesn’t matter,› said Rachel, holding up one three-fingered hand and studying the sharp, curved claws. ‹A, it’s awesome, and B, as long as we can acquire _from_ her—›

‹—and as long as we don’t need all seven of us in morph,› Marco interjected.

‹—then this is just as good.›

 

*        *        *

 

“If we do it this way, we’re all on the line,” Marco pointed out.

“Yeah, but if we split up, we’re weaker at every step,” I said. “We’ve all seen Episode III—I’m not sending half of us to one place and half of us to another, when we can all just do both missions. It’s bad enough that we don’t have Tobias—if something goes wrong, I want _everybody_ there to help.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Are you sure you want to do this, Garrett?” I asked. Around me, skepticism showed more or less openly on every face—Rachel dubious, Marco visibly opposed, Cassie sympathetic, Ax idly curious.

Garrett didn’t look up, didn’t speak—just sat there with his shirt pulled up around his mouth, staring resolutely at my shoes. But he nodded.

 _Be straightforward with him,_ Tobias had told me, just before leaving. _Blunt, even. Just don’t bullshit him._

“I’m a little nervous about this,” I said carefully. “Because it looks like _you’re_ nervous, and this is—well, this is the most important job.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a retard,” Garrett said—but mildly.

I nodded. “Fine. Garrett, you’re not acting like you can handle this.”

“Because I won’t look you in the eye.”

“And because you’ve got the shirt over your mouth. And because you’re curled up in a little ball. And there’s that sound you make when we’re not looking. This is pretty much the worst I’ve ever seen you, as far as—that stuff—is concerned. And Tobias isn’t here to—”

“I don’t need Tobias to take care of me.”

“—to _help_ you. The way Marco helps me. This stuff is scary—it’s okay to be scared. But not _too_ scared. Right now, you look too scared, which makes me want to ask Cassie or Marco to do it instead.”

I waited for the younger boy’s response.

‹This is a waste of—›

‹Ten seconds,› I interrupted, looking over to see whether it was Marco or Rachel I was interrupting. Neither face looked confused, which told me that whoever had sent the _first_ message had sent it so that all of us could hear.

All of us except—I hoped—Garrett himself.

It wasn’t the first time that the others had expressed reservations about the strange little orphan kid. The subject had come up twice since Tobias left, exacerbated by the fact that—in the older boy’s absence—Garrett had spent almost all of his time with Ax. Marco and Rachel and Cassie had seen little of his competence, and a _lot_ of his awkward, antisocial weirdness. It took _energy_ to deal with him, especially as the days dragged on and the little valley felt smaller and smaller—energy that was in short supply, given the stress we were already under.

But.

I wasn’t entirely sure why I was defending him—why I _wanted_ to defend him, as opposed to doing it out of a sense of duty or loyalty or virtue. It wasn’t any one thing—more like a mix of reasons, none of which would have been sufficient on their own.

There was the talk I’d had with Cassie, and the bad taste it had left in my mouth, that made me want to be a better person than—strictly speaking—I _had_ to be.

There was the fact that Tobias _did_ feel like an important part of the group, and that Tobias and Garrett were a package deal.

There was my quiet sense that Garrett was in fact a useful ally—that he had perspective and potential that we would miss, if we lost it. By all accounts, he’d already saved Tobias’s life once, not to mention his role in bringing us together with Ax.

Mostly, though, it was about the shape of the little tribe we were forming, the kind of group we needed to be, if we wanted to win this war. Sooner or later—and probably sooner—we were going to have to start growing. Recruiting. Sharing the morphing power, accepting that we didn’t have a monopoly on action. Ax was Elfangor’s brother—in a very real sense, Garrett was our only outsider. That made him—for me, at least—what, a weathervane? A test case? The question of whether we could make it work with Garrett seemed meaningfully tied up with the question of whether we could make it work with _anyone_ who wasn’t there from the beginning. It was a matter of setting precedent, of self-fulfilling prophecy—either way, we’d be creating a feedback loop.

But—and even I admitted this, had no interest in denying it—none of that would be relevant if he couldn’t pull his weight.

‹That’s ten,› said Marco, or maybe Rachel. ‹Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.›

Marco.

I opened my mouth—

Sucking in a deep breath, Garrett uncurled and climbed to his feet. Pulling his shirt down, he fixed his gaze somewhere in the vicinity of my left nostril, his arms held rigidly by his sides.

“I’d like to do this,” he said loudly. “I’m the smallest one, with the longest time limit, so it makes sense for it to be me. And I can handle it. I’m sorry I’m not as sneaky as everybody else is about whether or not I’m scared.”

I looked over at the others, caught Marco’s eye.

_Your call, Fearless Leader._

“Okay, then,” I said. “Trial number one. Let’s do this.”

Without further ceremony, I lay down on a patch of grass a few yards away from the firepit. Still looking vaguely terrified, Garrett stepped over and stood with one foot on either side of my torso, straddling me. For the briefest of moments, we made actual eye contact, and I gave him what I hoped would be taken as an encouraging nod.

“Here goes,” he muttered under his breath, and closed his eyes.

The basic idea was simple. According to Ax, the Yeerks either already had or very soon _would_ have something called a Gleet bio-filter installed at every entrance to the Yeerk pool. It would detect—and vaporize—any living thing that attempted to pass through it that was not approved—i.e. a human, Taxxon, or Hork-Bajir, complete with ride-along Yeerk.

In all likelihood, this would not be the only hurdle we would need to overcome. Given that Cassie and Marco had each independently come up with the idea in the same five-minute period, it was almost certain that Visser Three had defenses in place to guard against it.

But it was an important piece of the puzzle, which was: how do you get a two-hundred-pound lump of cesium—or better still, a hundred two-pound lumps—into the middle of the Yeerk pool?

Above, I had an unpleasantly clear view of Garrett as his skin turned gray and began to ooze a slimy, snailey lubricant. With unnerving swiftness, his eyelids fused shut and his mouth and nostrils vanished, leaving his face a horrifying lump of alien flesh. Dropping to his knees, he fell forward onto my chest, and I grimaced as the thick, wet heat began to soak through my shirt.

‹Sorry.›

I heard a sort of garbage-disposal sound that I could only imagine was his entire skeletal system shattering and dissolving. A septic, swampy odor filled the air, and the pressure on my legs and torso evened out as his own limbs melted together into a single puddle of goo. I closed my eyes, wishing he had started by shrinking.

‹Sorry.›

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, unsure whether he would even be able to hear me. _Next time, we let him morph in a pot of water and scoop him out._ The theory had been that it would be easier and more hygienic if he started out in contact with my body, but we hadn’t really taken into account just how gross the transition would be.

‹Jake.›

“Hmmm?” I said.

‹Jake, something’s wrong.›

Feeling a sudden spike of adrenaline, I opened my eyes.

There was nothing human left of Garrett’s body—it was a puddle of oozing gray flesh, covering me like the world’s largest booger. It didn’t look Yeerkish, either, though—instead of the pale, featureless gray, it was all shot through with delicate black veins, the pattern pulsing and shifting as if it were a nest of writhing snakes.

“What—”

I didn’t get to finish the question, because without warning, Garrett’s body suddenly swelled, a wave of alien biomass surging forward, knocking me flat on my back.

‹Garrett! Stop! Demorph!›

‹What?›

‹You’re suffocating Jake! Back to human, now!›

The slime and gunk were everywhere—in my eyes, in my mouth, up my nose and in my ears. I gagged, trying to inhale, and then retched, my throat filling with bile and acid. Acting on animal instinct, I began tearing at the soft flesh, trying to dig my way out to open air.

‹AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!›

‹Keep demorphing! Don’t stop!›

I could feel the weight across my face and chest decreasing, and with a final, desperate heave, I threw the other boy off of me, turning to the side and hacking as I tried to clear my airway. I was dimly aware of the others shouting, of the sound of footsteps, and then what felt like a gallon of water splashed across my face, clearing some of the muck.

‹Sorry sorry sorry what happened sorry so—›

Garrett’s thought-speak cut off abruptly as he passed the halfway mark in his demorph. A long forty-five seconds passed, in which I continued to cough and wheeze as the others threw more water on me, wiping my face and neck clean with rough towels.

Eventually, I got my breathing back under control and was able to open my eyes. Garrett was half a dozen yards away, curled up into a ball, his shirt fully obscuring his face and ooze and slime drenching his clothes. The others were standing around me in a semicircle, a mix of horror and confusion on every face.

“What,” shouted Marco, still holding an empty bucket, “the _fuck?_ Ax? Cassie? What the _everliving fuck_ just happened?”

‹I am sorry, Marco,› Ax said, sounding bewildered, his thought-speak even more grating than usual in his agitation. ‹I have absolutely no idea.›

 


	17. Chapter 15: Marco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's notes:
> 
> 1\. Slight retcon to morphing time limits, to normalize everybody to the same mathematical curve. This involved some minor changes to previous chapters that I probably won't bother to fix anytime soon, because probably nobody would have noticed anyway. In essence, they're all clustered around two hours, ranging from Jake (slightly under) and Ax (well under) to Garrett (well over).
> 
> 2\. Odds of tweaks to this chapter are higher than usual; it's been a stressful two weeks and I didn't hit all of the notes I wanted to hit. Your critical comments are even more greatly appreciated than usual, especially if accompanied by concrete suggestions. As always, I read every review here, and I love it when people join the discussion over at r/rational.
> 
> 3\. I have a Patreon (patreon dot com slash sabien). I have about five patrons at the moment. I'd love to have more, if people want to contribute to the development of the middle school rationality bootcamp I'm working on.

 

**Chapter 15: Marco**

My eyes were already open as I came awake—my feet already under me, my clothes already on. There were three stones in my right hand, as I’d known there would be, as there basically had to be.

I took a deep breath. I’d prepared for this as best I could, but the reality—

 _Are you there?_ I asked in my thoughts—quietly, to whatever extent “quiet” meant anything inside my own head.

Silence. Inevitable, expected.

I began to count doubles—one, two, four, eight, sixteen—growing more and more tense with each passing number, sweat prickling under my hair and trickling down the back of my neck.

Thirty-two.

Sixty-four.

One-twenty-eight.

Two-fifty-six.

Five hundred twelve.

One thousand twenty-four.

Two thousand forty-eight.

Four thousand ninety-six.

Eight thousand one hundred ninety-two.

Sixteen thousand three hundred eighty four.

Thirty two thousand six hundred—seven?—seven hundred and—

I stopped. I had two-to-the-fourteenth memorized, and not two-to-the-fifteenth, and with that, it was settled, my last scrap of self-protective doubt obliterated, annihilated. I had known it from the first moment, but knowing was one thing, and proof was—

Something else.

I took another deep breath, the air catching raggedly in my throat.

 _What day is it?_ I thought.

Like magic—like thought-speak—the answer came back, a whisper from the other Marco. The real Marco, the one in control, who’d been quietly giving me space as I dealt with the reality of the situation.

<It’s Tuesday,> he said. <The twelfth.>

Six days. One for the memory to sink in—to become a part of the physical structure of my brain. Then the acquisition, which I didn’t remember— _couldn’t_ remember, any more than I could remember the last moment of wakefulness before falling asleep.

And then five more days. Five days in which I’d been frozen, unreal, irrelevant—a potential person, a pattern in my own memory. In the meantime, Marco would have calculated two-to-the-fifteenth, would have committed the number to memory. Tomorrow, he would let Jake or Rachel or—no, not Tobias, Tobias would still be gone—let them acquire him, and acquire himself back. And then there would be three of us, where right now there were only two.

Version control.

 _My_ idea. Me—the Marco in between.

 _Can you hear all of this?_ I asked.

<Yeah,> came the reply. <It’s—well—yeah.>

 _Can you—I mean, can you let me—you know—hear you, too?_ I tried not to think the word _please_ , knowing even as I did that it was futile, that he—I—would hear it anyway.

Silence. Then—

<Sorry. I guess not.>

I sucked in another long, slow breath. _It’s fine,_ I thought. _Don’t worry about it._

There was a pause. <Do you—I mean, are you—>

_It’s fine._

There was a strange moment of mental reflection, in which I _knew_ —despite being unable to hear it directly—knew what the other Marco was thinking, and knew that he knew it, and knew that he knew that I knew that he knew it—a cascading upward spiral in which we both considered the question that I wanted to ask, the question I’d anticipated, that I had decided in advance I would _not_ answer, and realized that I—he—was going to answer it anyway. It had been silly to pretend otherwise—a good, general policy taken to an extreme, irrational conclusion.

<They’re all still alive.>

_And—_

<No. They’ve still got him.>

I squeezed my eyes shut, a sudden tremble in my chin. _Thanks,_ I thought, knowing there was nothing more to say.

After a time, I opened my eyes again.

_Okay. How can I help?_

<There’s a plan.>

I nodded—physically nodded, registering for the first time where we—I—was standing. Marco had climbed up to the highest rock in the shattered pile of boulders that made up the north end of the valley. It was my favorite spot, with a peaceful view of the back side of the mountain range—no humans, no buildings, just greens and browns and granite grays. He had clearly chosen it on purpose—a small but meaningful kindness.

_Yeah, you’re such a great guy, Marco._

I experienced the thought, rather than broadcasting it intentionally, and the real Marco let it pass without comment. He could afford to be tolerant—of the two of us, he wasn’t the one whose lifespan was measured in minutes.

And with that, the thought that I had been trying not to think found wings, broke through the barriers and echoed across the surface of my mind.

_Oh, God. I’m going to die._

I had at most two hours—probably less, if the real Marco was under any kind of time pressure. Two hours, and then he would demorph, and I would be gone, dissolved back into the æther. It was _completely_ inevitable—there was not one single thing that I could do to prevent it, and the fact that the original version of me would continue on in his own body failed to provide even the slightest shred of comfort.

<Hey—>

_Just give me a minute, okay? Just—just give me one fucking minute. I don’t need—_

He backed off.

Thirty seconds later, I wiped the tears away from my cheeks, blinking until the mountains stopped being blurry. It was a warm, beautiful day, the horizon clearly visible a hundred miles away.

_Okay. Talk._

<We’re still trying to crack the Yeerk pool, but we ran into a snag. Something went wrong with the Yeerk morph, and we’re not sure what. We’re going to try for another one of the cylinders, as a test.>

_You’re running the exact same—_

<Please. No, we figure it’s time to start hitting them for real, and we’ll grab a cylinder on our way out.>

He laid out the situation in broad strokes. The Yeerks had concentrated their firepower in four separate locations—the pool, the high school, the downtown police station, and the hospital. According to the Chee, each of them was openly alien on the inside, with holograms at the entrances and Hork-Bajir and other aliens working side by side with human Controllers.

The pool and the high school were both protected by impenetrable shields; Ax claimed that each was only a half-dome, and could be bypassed from below, but he also admitted that Visser Three would have _definitely_ made plans for that possibility.

The police station was currently too tough a nut to crack—it was their main response hub, with three Bug fighters hovering overhead on permanent standby and a _lot_ of troops on alert inside.

The hospital was apparently undefended, and even Rachel was smart enough to recognize the trap.

<Jake wanted us to take one of the houses back, but I talked him out of it. There’s a bunch of other houses with known Controllers, plus a ton of random businesses, and we could always try just snatching someone off the street, but it’s getting harder because they’re traveling everywhere in triplets and pretty much every one of them has a gun.>

_What about the stunners?_

<Ax figures they’re running out. There’s only so much tech they could have brought with them, and they don’t have full manufacturing capability yet.>

_So, what’s the plan?_

<There’s a truck.>

A big one, about the size of a large U-Haul. It left from a supply depot on the outskirts of town every other day, heading for the pool, carrying food and soda.

_Obvious target._

<Yeah. There’s a couple of guards in the back, and a team that goes over the cargo with a fine-tooth comb before they let it inside the shield. Looks like they irradiate the whole truck, too, in case of insects. But we’re not going to hit it on its way _in._ >

It had taken them a few reconnaissance trips to notice, but the truck was just as heavy on its return trip as it was when it left the warehouse—just as low on the tires, just as wobbly on the speedbumps, and just as slow on the turns.

<We don’t know what it is, but we figure we ought to steal it, or at the very least wreck it.>

_It could be thirty Hork-Bajir!_

<We’ve got a plan for that.>

About halfway between the pool and the warehouse, the truck’s route took it across Lake Mackintosh, the county reservoir. It wasn’t a huge lake—maybe a half mile wide at that point—and the bridge was basically just more road, held about twenty feet above the water by thick, concrete pillars.

_You’re going to blow the bridge?_

<With Ax’s phaser things. Shredders.>

_What about the Controllers?_

<Cassie’s sitting this one out.>

I swallowed. It was a cold, brutal answer, and I could picture exactly how the conversation must have gone down. _Okay,_ I thought. _So you—you’ve got somebody in the water? To rip open the truck?_

<Garrett, as squid. Cassie thinks he can survive for a while in fresh water, so he’s going to drag off whatever seems valuable—and pull the Controllers out of the cab, to get their weapons and spare Yeerks.>

We went over the rest of the details, one by one. I bit my lip, looking down at the cloud-shadows mottling the slope of the mountain, my heart sinking as Marco fleshed out the plan in my head. There were a dozen things that could go wrong—a hundred, a thousand. I did my best to point them out, and together, the other Marco and I considered them, making small adjustments to the plan.

 _What if the bridge doesn’t break?_ I asked, at one point. _Or if it falls in early, and the truck just stops?_

<We bail,> Marco said. <No point taking extra risk. We’re hoping, we do it this way, it all happens so fast the Yeerks never even get a distress signal. Ax is pretty sure he can time it so it falls right as they’re coming up to it.>

_So no distractions, then?_

<Jake wants everybody nearby, especially since we’re down to five. Plus, we don’t want to show all our tricks before we’re ready to take on the pool, and we don’t want somebody getting killed because some Controller happens to get in a lucky shot.>

We talked, and talked, and talked, going over the whole thing twice—thrice—four times. We talked about Visser Three, and the information Rachel had pulled out of his head. We talked about the things _he_ would have been able to pull from _Rachel_ , and whether Ax’s surprise presence would provide any sort of advantage, and whether the Visser already knew about using the morphing tech to store objects and tools. We talked about sodium, and bleach, and whether or not the National Guard armory had hand grenades. We talked about Elfangor, though for obvious reasons we both skirted the topic of digging through his memories by force. We talked about Jake, and Marco filled me in on how he was doing. We didn’t talk about Dad, but he was there, in the background, underlining our thoughts.

Eventually, it became clear that there was nothing more to talk about. That Marco was stringing things along, stretching out the time.

Keeping me alive.

I fought back a sudden urge to cry, looked down at my feet as the mountains turned blurry once again. In my head, the other Marco said nothing.

_What are you—_

—waiting for, I wanted to say, but some surge of self-preservation instinct stopped me from forming the words, even in my own thoughts. I wanted to shout it, to scream and rage, to retreat from my fear into bitter fury.

But if I did, he might stop waiting, and I didn’t want to die.

 _Cut the crap,_ a part of me whispered. _It’s not like you’re_ actually _dying, any more than you’re_ actually _fourteen. You’re a copy. You’re a program he booted up for a while. When he turns you off, you’re still going to be there._

Except I wouldn’t—not really. Not _me,_ not the memories of the past hour. I’d be wiped, reset—reformed from scratch, like when one of our morphs got injured in battle.

 _You knew this was going to happen. The second you decided to make backups, you_ knew _you’d eventually wake up as the clone._

And I’d thought, then, that I’d be okay with it. That I’d understand. That as long as _one_ of me kept on living, I’d feel like it wasn’t really over.

But it was. I had memories of fourteen long years, and in a few minutes, they would end, and me along with them. Scrubbing away the tears, I looked down at my index finger, at the faint scar on the second joint, a memento from the time I’d slammed it in the car door in second grade.

I wasn’t just a copy. If Jake was still Jake, even after what had happened, then I really _was_ Marco. Not the original, but still _real._ If Marco Prime stayed in morph, I’d go on living—would grow up, grow old, have a life. I’d get to go to prom, take the road trip across the country that Dad had been promising for years, start a family somewhere. Even if we lost the war, I wouldn’t just _vanish._

 _Marco_ , I began.

<Sorry,> he said.

And I felt the changes begin.

 

*        *        *

 

I finished throwing up and wiped my lips with the back of my hand, spitting to get the taste of bile out of my mouth. I’d thought about switching him off again—taking back total control—but in the end, I couldn’t do it. It would’ve made me feel better about it, and I didn’t _want_ to feel better about it. I deserved every plea, every curse, every heart-wrenching knife that the past version of myself had sunk into me as I slowly murdered him, dissolving his existence away. I would carry that memory with me forever—it would be a part of every new backup I made from now on.

Straightening, I took one last look at the mountain range—at the crumpled ridges, the fluffy white clouds. A hawk floated on the breeze, tracing lazy circles against the deep blue of the sky. It was quiet, and peaceful, and calm.

 _Fuck you, Elfangor,_ I thought.

And I turned and headed back to camp.

 

*        *        *

 

<Jake here, ETA four minutes. Down the chain, over.>

<Jake and Marco ready, four minutes, pass it down, over.>

<Garrett here. Under water, ready, Jake and Marco set. Three minutes fifty, over.>

There was a long silence as the message continued out of range, Garrett passing word to Ax, who would pass word to Rachel on the far side of the bridge and then bring confirmation back. I peered out from the concealing brush at the side of the road, straining to hear the sound of the distant truck’s engine, but it was too soon. At three and a half minutes and something like fifty miles per hour, it was still well over two miles away.

<Garrett here. Ax is ready at the second break zone, Rachel’s good to drop the tree if she has to but she says no one’s coming. Over.>

<Jake,> I broadcast. <It’s Marco. Everybody’s set, over.>

<Three minutes.>

Ax had used his Shredders to score the bridge structure in two places, weakening the steel and concrete until it was just barely supporting its own weight. As the truck passed the first, the whole section should drop away and into the water; if it didn’t, Ax would have a few seconds to cut away the last few supports holding up the second.

Rachel was in Andalite morph on the far shore, ready to block the road in case some innocent family came by in their SUV at the wrong time. As soon as the bridge went down, she’d sprint toward the rest of us. I’d be coming in from behind, chasing the truck, and Jake would dive in from above if he wasn’t needed to stop any other cars coming along behind. With luck, we would all converge on Garrett’s position within a minute of one another.

<Still no sign of Bug fighters?> I asked, looking up at the empty sky. <From Marco,> I added hastily. <Over.>

<Nothing,> Jake replied. <Relax.>

 _He should have used pigeon morph. He should have used pigeon morph, or better yet we should have brought Cassie and made_ her _use pigeon morph. We should have just blocked the road on the far side and had Rachel standing by closer. We should have warned the Chee. There could be thirty Hork-Bajir with guns in the back of that truck. We should’ve recruited more kids from Tobias’s orphanage. There could be Bug fighters—Rachel’s going to be exposed on the bridge for like thirty seconds; if there are Bug fighters she’s just going to die. We should—_

<Two minutes.>

I shook my head. Should should should. No point in obsessing over it, at this point. The dice were already rolling.

I’d read the Wikipedia article on the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare, on one of our incognito trips to the library to get internet access. Turns out people had just written it all down—attacking in small groups, using camouflage and captured weapons, avoiding casualties while forcing the larger enemy to spread itself thin or waste resources overprotecting every base and transportation route. The operation we were about to pull was basic, almost textbook—hit hard and fast, on a relatively undefended target, and get out before the enemy has time to react.

The question was, was that good enough? Was it a strategy that could win even though Visser Three would have considered it—predicted it?

The Yeerks didn’t know about Ax. They didn’t know about weaponized thought-speak. They didn’t know we could carry items in morph, or that we could access the memories of anyone we morphed into—unless maybe they did. It was impossible to tell what Visser Three did or didn’t know, impossible to judge what he’d managed to pull out of Rachel’s head during their split-second mind meld, or what he’d simply figured out on his own. He’d had access to the morphing tech for almost two years, according to Ax, and he could look at all of Alloran’s memories and theories.

Did we want to use every advantage we had, maximizing our chances of success? Or did we want to hold back, preserving a few surprises, a few critical tricks?

<One minute.>

I’d done a report on Alan Turing, in eighth grade—on Bletchley Park and Ultra, the secret British codebreaking operation that cracked the Nazi military communications during World War II. For a while, the British had known the positions of just about every German U-Boat in the Atlantic, and had foreknowledge of over half of the upcoming attacks on Allied ships.

And what they’d done with that information was—mostly—nothing. At each step of the way, it was more important to preserve their overall ability to read German communications than it was to rescue this or that convoy. If the Germans had figured out that their codes were broken, they would’ve just switched to a better system. So the Allies waited, and watched, intervening only when the intel could be explained away as luck or reconnaissance or the work of double agents. And eventually, the secrecy, the sacrifices—it all paid off, on D-Day.

Already the Yeerks were traveling in triplets. Already, according to the Chee, they were stunning people the second the Yeerks crawled out of their heads, storing the unconscious bodies along the side of the pool and reviving people only after they’d already been reinfested. If each of our successes made the odds of the next success smaller, rather than bigger—

We needed to hit the Yeerk pool _yesterday._

<Here we go. Nearest car is about four miles back.>

<Incoming,> I relayed to Garrett, and watched through the tangle of leaves and branches as the truck came around the bend and accelerated into the straightaway. There were two Controllers visible in the front cab, both wearing navy blue overalls and looking bored. The box in the back was maybe fifteen feet long, with a bright painting of a cornucopia on the side.

It passed me, and I tensed, waiting for the right moment. I didn’t want them to spot me chasing after them in the rearview mirror. Above me, the small gray dot that was Jake angled past, shedding altitude as it accelerated toward the critical point.

There was a _crack—_ a rumble—a splash—the sound of a horn, sustained but muffled—

<Now.>

I burst from the undergrowth, the thorns pulling a few of my feathers loose from my thick, scaly skin. Ahead of me, Jake dove below the road and out of sight, disappearing into the cloud of dust rising from the gaping, fifty-foot hole.

<Jake here. It’s not sinking. Over.>

<What?> I demanded, my legs pumping as fast as they could, claws clicking against the asphalt as I held my long tail rigid behind me for balance.

<Front’s underwater. It’s headfirst. Back’s upright, sticking out maybe five feet. Garrett?>

<I’m on it. Over.>

I reached the edge of the ragged breakpoint just as Garrett’s tentacles broke the surface, latching on to the crumpled box and tugging it sideways. <If they managed to send a signal—>

<We _know,_ Marco, > said Jake, flapping for altitude as he rose in a tight spiral.

<It is unlikely that anyone inside is conscious,> came a voice that I assumed was Ax. <The acceleration to zero was extremely violent.>

Across the gap, Rachel approached, her blue fur blurring and melting together into the tight, dark Spandex of her gymnastics outfit. <Rachel here,> she said. <What morph? Combat? Evasion? Over.>

<Give me a minute. Jake, over.>

<AHHHHHHHH!>

<Who was that? What happened?>

<They’re shooting!>

<What?>

<Inside the truck. Dracon beams. I—it’s me, Garrett. They shot off one of my tentacles.>

<Get clear!>

<Roger.>

I peered over the edge, at the churning, turbulent water. The truck was completely submerged now, lying sideways with the nearer side about eight feet down. I thought I saw a dark stain that might have been blood, and a stream of bubbles rising from the hole the Controller inside had just made—

TSEWWWWWW!

I reared backward and fell as the laser beam sliced shockingly close to my face, my tail bending painfully underneath me. <Watch it!> I shouted. <They’re cutting their way out!>

There was a popping sound, followed by a gurgling sort of _whumpf_ , and I rolled over onto my stomach, crawling awkwardly back to the lip. Turning my long snout sideways, I peered over.

There were two humans in combat gear, floating in the water. One appeared to be unconscious, held up by the other, who was using his one free arm to swim and shoot at the same time and doing a bad job of both.

<We’re going to have company,> somebody said.

Pushing myself to my feet, I crouched on the edge, my eyes tracking the wild flailing of the Yeerk weapon. The man was panicked, gasping, his attention on the water around and under him.

<Garrett,> I whispered. <It’s Marco. Make a splash in three seconds. Over.>

_Three—_

_Two—_

_One—_

I stepped out into open space just as a tentacle broke the surface, thirty feet away. Whirling, the man fired, the beam sending up a curtain of steam as I extended my legs, claws first—

I hit hard, one foot on his shoulder, the other on the top of his skull. I felt bone give way in both places, felt the impact shiver up my legs as he plunged into the water, the waves closing in around me.

<He’s down. Marco took care of it.>

A tentacle wrapped itself around my chest, gentle but terrifyingly strong. It lifted me up to the surface, unwound itself, rested beneath my abdomen as I caught my breath, my feathers heavy and waterlogged.

<Thanks.>

<Rachel, Ax—into the water. Rachel in the back, Ax in the cab. Grab what you can and get under the bridge. Morph fish and take the stuff with you. Garrett and Marco and I will meet you at the rendezvous.>

<I can—>

<Shut up. Demorph.>

<What’s going—>

<I don’t know. I’m out of the sky. Demorphing already. Garrett, let Marco go, grab what you can from the truck, and _move._ >

The tentacle beneath me vanished, and I floundered, spreading my arms and tail and kicking as I fought to stay afloat. I heard splashes around me as Rachel and Ax entered the water, as Garrett dove back below the surface. I concentrated on my human form, wishing for once that I could _choose_ to demorph naked. But the clothes I’d sent along with my body came back, shoes and all, and I struggled to stay afloat as I tried vainly to remove various waterlogged items that were still physically connected to my skin.

Finally, the morph was complete. Kicking off my shoes and pants, I swam back under the uncollapsed portion of the bridge, where Jake was waiting. “Bug fighters?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” Jake said tersely. “Don’t think so, but it’s time to get out of here.” He nodded toward the truck. “No cylinders. Not one, on any of the four of them.”

 _Shit._ “What else did we get?”

“Later.”

Taking several deep breaths, he dove beneath the surface and headed for the truck. I treaded water for a moment, out of sight beneath the bridge, straining my ears for the sound of—

_Retard. Move._

I swam two strokes and then stopped, my brain finally processing what I was seeing.

The water around me was mostly still, the gush of air from the truck having finally petered out. The blood—from Garrett, from the Controller I’d killed—had mostly thinned out. There were two bodies floating nearby, both wearing black combat gear. One of them was face down, the gaping wounds in his head and shoulders mercifully hidden by the gentle waves.

The other was on his back, and his chest was moving.

_Shit._

He had been unconscious the whole time. He hadn’t seen anything.

_Shit shit shit._

I swam over to him. He was beefy, maybe in his mid-thirties, with a five o’clock shadow and a lump the size of a tennis ball on his forehead. His breathing was slow and steady, his torso buoyed by his Kevlar vest.

I could roll him over, and let the water take care of it. I could leave him, and join Jake in the truck, collecting more of whatever was down there.

Or—

 _You_ did _come here looking for a Yeerk to acquire._

Or I could take him with me.

_No time. Decide._

Letting out a strangled yell of frustration, I grabbed him by the arm and began tugging him back under the bridge and out of sight.

_He weighs two hundred pounds, maybe two hundred thirty with all the gear. Ax weighs two twenty two and has a morph time of eighty minutes. I weigh one hundred and have a morph time of one thirty-six minutes. Rise over run, that’s—that’s—_

_—should have figured this equation out ahead of time—_

_—shut up, that’s—one hundred twenty two pounds and—and fifty-six minutes’ difference—so two pounds cuts off one minute, so two hundred thirty pounds cuts off a hundred and fifteen minutes, making my time limit—_

Twenty-one minutes. Maybe. Assuming the relationship was linear, which it almost certainly wasn’t, because why would it be? We’d drawn out the points, I _remembered_ drawing out the points, but I couldn’t remember which way the thing curved, so I’d either have _more_ than twenty-one minutes, or I’d have _less_ —

_Go._

Turning, I pulled the Controller into an embrace and focused. Osprey—it was small, it was fast, and it was able to take off out of water. I could fly for ten minutes and be five miles away.

And then—

_Later. Move._

 

*        *        *

 

<I can’t go back to the valley just yet.>

<What? Why not?>

<Because one of the things I’m carrying is probably a Yeerk tracking device.>

<Marco, what the—>

<I’ll explain later.>

 

*        *        *

 

_Tick-tock, tick-tock._

I demorphed as quickly as I could, half expecting the Controller to come out dead or disintegrated or something. But he was fine. As quickly as I could, I stripped him down to his underwear, throwing everything except his Dracon beam into a pile under a bush. Grabbing the beam in one hand and the Controller’s hand in the other, I focused again, this time on the snipe.

_If the tracker isn’t in his stuff—if it’s under his skin—_

Later. I would deal with it later.

 

*        *        *

 

It was almost sunset by the time I made it back to the valley. I’d morphed and demorphed four more times, unwilling to take chances with the time limit. After the second change, I’d paused for an hour to rest, leaving the Controller spread-eagled at the top of a sheer stone spire and waiting a few hundred yards away to see if the Yeerks would come looking for him.

They didn’t.

_Don’t get cocky. Just because the trackers aren’t embedded in their skin YET doesn’t mean they won’t be next week._

And on top of that—

_Just because they haven’t showed up HERE doesn’t mean they’re not tracking you. They could be waiting to see where you end up before barging in. In fact, they could be mapping all of this, to check out later._

So I’d spent the third and fourth morphs going in a completely different direction, looking for a convenient place to tie him up. Eventually, I found an old shack, at least five miles from the nearest road, with a half-collapsed roof and a hundred feet of sketchy, moldy rope. I burned another half hour in gorilla morph, piling logs all around the shack and covering the hole with a mess of brambles.

Then I headed back to the others.

“His name is Aaron Tidwell,” I said. It was just me, Jake, Cassie, and Rachel; Garrett and Ax were off somewhere with some of the tech they’d recovered from the truck. “He’s ex-military, Iraq war two. He got out in 2011 and signed up for a private security company called Bastion, Inc. He’s been a Controller for three weeks now—since just a couple days before Elfangor landed. He’s got no kids, no girlfriend. He usually covers armored car deliveries, but when the Yeerks noticed Bastion they took it over and folded all the guys in with the rest of the police and the local National Guard group. He’s been running this route for over a week.”

“Does he know what goes on at the other end?” Rachel asked.

I shook my head. “He stays with the truck. They fill up with food, they drop off all over town. They fill up again, they drop off at the Yeerk pool, and sometimes they load up with stuff and bring it back to the warehouse.”

I looked over at the rest of our loot, an assortment of metal objects lying in neat rows on the grass of the meadow. “He doesn’t really know what any of that is,” I continued. “Does Ax?”

“Not important,” Jake said, making a small chopping motion with his hand. “Not right now. Priority one is what we do with this guy.”

I chewed at my lip. Jake had said that none of the four Controllers had cylinders on them. Garrett had been in squid morph, Ax had checked the cab, and Rachel had gone straight into the rear compartment of the truck. That meant it had been Jake who checked the two floating bodies, and Jake who’d decided not to mention that one of them was still alive.

“He hadn’t woken up, as of about forty-five minutes ago,” I said. “I don’t know what that means as far as brain injuries are concerned, but it’s not good.”

Jake shifted minutely, his gaze shifting to Cassie. “Erek?” he asked.

She nodded and left the circle.

Turning back to me, Jake crossed his arms. “Risky,” he said simply. “Explain.”

I shrugged. “No time to think,” I said. “This kept options open.”

“You acquired him?”

“Yeah. Like I said, he still hadn’t woken up.”

“What’s he know?”

“Not much. Passwords for getting into the Yeerk pool, but they’ll change those. A look at the inside of the pool from two days ago. A few Controllers who outrank him; couple people there we might look into. He’s a guy who follows orders. His Yeerk is pretty much the same.”

“You got something on the Yeerk?”

“Not really. Just what Tidwell remembers. The Yeerk’s name is Illim. Seems—alien. Didn’t talk much, didn’t really interact with Tidwell at all. Ignored him, mostly.” I glanced at Rachel. “Not at all like Esplin.”

Jake’s expression went sour, and he stood up and began to pace. Beside me, Rachel was silent, her eyes occasionally drifting toward the pile of stolen Yeerk tech as she slowly rubbed her hands together.

There were really only two options. Three, I guess, if you counted the possibility that Tidwell might just die of whatever head injury he’d suffered during the crash. We could hold him for a day and a half, starve the Yeerk out of his head, and acquire it.

Or we could kill him.

“You weren’t tracked?” Jake asked abruptly. “He didn’t have any kind of communicator on him?”

“Stripped him down to his underwear,” I said. “Watched for an hour to see if the Yeerks would show up. I think he’s clean.”

There was a long moment in which Jake seemed to study me, looking me up and down and then locking eyes for what felt like forever. “All right,” he said. “We wait for Erek to get back, and then we go.”

“What are you—I mean, what are we going to do, once we get there?”

“That depends on the Yeerk.”

 

*        *        *

 

There was noise inside the shack—motion.

“Erek,” Jake whispered. “Go.”

Nodding tightly, the boy spun and disappeared back into the forest. He had been trembling throughout the entire journey, his human body shaking and shivering like he was shirtless in a snowstorm. We still hadn’t figured out exactly what the limits on his programming were—those very limits made it impossible for him to explain—but it couldn’t have been easy to accompany the four of us to a shack where we’d tied up a prisoner we were maybe going to end up torturing. It was just as well that Mr. Tidwell had woken up; if he still needed medical attention, we could give it to him back at the camp.

“Marco,” Jake said, his voice still low. “You’re up.”

<Illim,> I called out in thought-speak, and the motion stopped.

Beside me, Rachel was seven and a half feet tall in her Hork-Bajir morph, a deadly-looking laser rifle in one hand and a shock-stick in the other. As luck would have it, nearly a quarter of the things we’d stolen had turned out to be weapons.

<Illim, your host body is injured. You’re defenseless, and you’re a long way from home. We’ve got you surrounded. Will you talk?>

Silence from the shack. “Start moving the trees,” Jake said.

I loped forward, my gorilla knuckles dragging across the ground. One at a time, I heaved on the logs that were blocking the door, tipping them over into the undergrowth beside the dilapidated cabin. I paused before removing the last log, and Rachel leveled the gun, lining up her sights.

Jake nodded.

With one swift motion, I tossed the final log out of the way, unbarring the door. <Come out,> I said. <Slowly.>

The door creaked open and the human body of Aaron Tidwell emerged into the moonlight.

“Stop,” Jake said, his voice heavy with authority.

Tidwell stopped. He looked awful, the lump on his forehead forcing one of his eyes shut, stripes of dirt covering his body where I’d tied him up with the filthy, fraying rope. His fingernails were cracked and bleeding, and there were scratches on his arms that made me think he’d tried to climb out through the brambles on the roof.

“Andalite?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“No. Human.”

Jake stepped forward, Rachel drifting slowly to one side to keep a line of fire open. When he was ten feet away, he stopped, looking up at the heavyset veteran.

“My name is Jake,” he said coldly. “My friends and I raided your truck today. The other three Controllers on board were killed.”

Tidwell’s eyes narrowed, and he turned his head slowly to look at me, then at Rachel, wincing slightly with the motion. “You are—human?”

“Yes.” Jake held up his arm, revealing a fully-formed tiger’s paw, which slowly began to melt back into a human hand. “Humans who morph.”

“You know my name.”

“Yes. And we know the name of your host—Aaron Tidwell.”

“How?”

Jake shook his head. “No.” He turned his hand over, and as the last of the fur disappeared, a small, silvery cylinder began to grow out of his palm.

Tidwell’s eyes widened.

“I show you secrets,” Jake said. “Do you understand what that means?”

Tidwell’s shoulders slumped, his jaw going slack. “You’re going to kill me now.”

“Maybe.” He held up the cylinder. “Or maybe not. You know what this is?”

Tidwell nodded.

“Will you give up your host? Willingly? It’s been two days since you last went to the Yeerk pool. You’ve got to be feeling hungry, in there. If you come out, we will keep you alive—keep you safe.”

Tidwell’s eyes narrowed. Jake shrugged, an elaborately casual motion. “It makes no difference to us, Illim” he drawled. “Either way, Aaron Tidwell walks out of this forest a free man. You can either give him up now, or you can trade your life for an extra day, and we’ll burn your shriveled husk out of his head after you die. I don’t know what Kandrona starvation is like, but if it’s anything like the human kind, it’ll be punishment enough.”

He held up his other hand, all five fingers extended. “Offer made,” he said. “Five seconds.”

He put down a finger. “Now four.”

He put down another.

Then another.

“All right,” said Tidwell. Illim. “Give me the cylinder.”

Jake tossed it lightly, underhanded. Ax had checked it out before we left, confirming that there were no alarms or weapons or communicators hidden in its circuits. Tidwell reached to catch it—missed—almost lost his balance as the cylinder fell to the forest floor. Wincing again, he bent to pick it up, pressed a few buttons, held the device up to his ear.

At the last second, he hesitated. “You will—you will stun my host?” he asked. “So that he does not kill me as I relinquish control?”

Jake shook his head. “Nope,” he said bluntly. “You can beg him for forgiveness—ask him to let you live. If he says no—well.” He shrugged again. “If he says no, you can stay in there until you rot.”

Even inside the gorilla, I felt an urge to let my jaw drop. This was a side of Jake I’d never seen before—cold and cruel and completely uncaring. It was different from the way he wrangled Rachel and Tobias—different even from the way he spoke to Ax, constantly reinforcing his dominance over the alien cadet. He sounded like a killer, like a sociopath, like—

_—like somebody whose father is being held captive in a concentration camp inside his own head._

Tidwell stood frozen for a long moment, his expression irresolute. We waited—me resting on my knuckles, Jake standing with his hands clasped behind his back, Rachel with the rifle held perfectly steady.

Finally, he moved. Without another word, he pressed the cylinder against his ear, the pained expression on his face doubling as he slowly sank to his knees. There was a soft squelching sound, like someone stepping on a sponge, and a red light appeared on the end of the stasis device.

After a few seconds, the light turned white, and Tidwell seemed to sag, the cylinder falling away from his hands as he dropped forward onto all fours. For a pair of heartbeats, none of us moved, and then he began to cry—harsh, barking sobs that tore their way out of his throat, shaking his whole body.

 

*        *        *

 

“What are you going to do with the Yeerk?” I asked.

“Illim,” Jake said softly turning the cylinder over in his hands. “Its name is Illim.”

We’d pulled it out of stasis long enough to acquire it, then put it back into the little metal tube while we tried the morph again. Tidwell hadn’t stuck around to watch—after we brought him back to the valley, he disappeared into one of the huts with Erek and Cassie and hadn’t come out since.

The morph had gone exactly as it had the previous time, with both Jake and Rachel turning into swollen, veiny, gelatinous masses before giving up and reverting back to their own bodies. We were no closer to solving the mystery, which meant we were no closer to getting inside the pool—at least, not with Plan A.

In front of me, Jake’s eyes glittered in the firelight, his expression closed and thoughtful. We were the last two awake, the moon sinking down toward the horizon as the air grew cold and wet.

“I guess we’ll keep it,” he said. “We _did_ promise to keep it alive. And it may end up being useful for something, eventually.”

“And Tidwell?”

He shrugged. “Not sure. We don’t have the cube, so we can’t exactly recruit him, full stop. And the Yeerks will have their eyes out for him. Might be that the best we can do for him is send him away.”

“He’s a grownup,” I pointed out. “And a vet. He might be able to help get us in with somebody in the military.”

“Nothing we can’t do ourselves,” Jake countered. “Especially since you’ve already acquired him.”

“Well,” I said, trailing off.

I still hadn’t told anybody about what had happened with the other Marco—not even Rachel, who’d been the one to help me acquire him. Me. Myself. I had dipped into Tidwell’s mind, but I’d kept an iron grip on his consciousness, holding him in a sort of dream state while I dug through his memory. Even that had been nauseating, and I wasn’t looking forward to repeating the experience.

 _Not like you have a choice. There_ is _a war on, you know—every scrap of intel helps._

“Anyway,” Jake continued, snapping me out of my reverie. “Whatever we decide, tomorrow’s going to be busy. Ax finished inventorying the stuff we got, and there’s a lot—enough to make a dent in the police station and the hospital, if not the pool.”

I frowned, looking over across the fire at my friend, trying to make out his expression in the shifting, flickering light. His voice sounded off—flat, empty, like he still hadn’t fully recovered from his performance at the shack.

“Jake,” I said cautiously. He didn’t look up. “Jake, are you all right?”

There was a long pause. “No,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

“What—”

“In the water. Tidwell. I checked him for cylinders. I knew he was alive.”

I blinked. “Yeah,” I said slowly. “I figured.”

“I knew he was alive, and I knew I should do something about it, and I couldn’t think of _what_ to do, so I just—ignored it. Just ignored him and kept going.”

“So?”

“So maybe Cassie’s right. About this whole thing. About where our heads are going to end up. Because I—he—he was going to drown, Marco. Right? I mean, sure, he managed to float for a little while, but if we’d just _left_ —with the waves, and with all that gear—”

He broke off, and turned to squint at me. “But _you_ didn’t just leave him. Even after you killed the other one. You knew what to do. And now he’s alive—he’s alive, and he’s free, and he would’ve been dead if it were up to me, because I couldn’t take ten extra seconds to brainstorm.”

My mouth worked soundlessly as I struggled to find words. “You—I mean—we—it was tense.” I gritted my teeth, hoping I sounded more convincing than I felt. “We were under pressure, you were trying to get everybody out. It was a lot to juggle. And with Cassie and Tobias gone—”

“Maybe we _shouldn’t_ be in charge of this war, Marco. Maybe _I_ shouldn’t. I mean, I know Tobias is working on it, but maybe—maybe it’s time to do more than that. Maybe you’re right—maybe this Tidwell—”

“No,” I cut in. “I mean, yeah, definitely, for sure, but not—not because—”

I trailed off, trying to put my thoughts into coherent sentences. “Look. The way you handled Ax? The way you handled Garrett? The way you talked the Yeerk out of Tidwell’s head? Sure—we’re _way_ past due to get some grownups involved. But this group? Us? We’re only working _because_ of you, man. Whatever magic it is that you do—I can’t do it. Rachel can’t. Earlier today, when Cassie bailed on the mission—that would have torn the whole group apart, if you hadn’t been there to smooth it over.”

Jake said nothing, only continued staring at the cylinder in his hands.

“I—look,” I continued. “It’s not about you getting every call exactly right, okay? It’s not like I made the right choice, and you made the wrong one. We’re a team, you know? A bunch of teenage superhero animal morphers. Animorphs, man—here to save the world. And just because you’re calling the shots doesn’t mean you have to do all the work. You be Captain America, and the rest of us, we’ve got your back.”

“Maybe,” he repeated, his tone heavy and dull. “Maybe. But the next time, it’s not going to be so easy. And what if it’s not some random Controller? What if it’s Rachel’s cousins? Or your dad? Or Tom?”

I flinched. “If it comes down to that,” I said slowly, “I’d rather have you making the call than anybody else.”

But even as I said it, I couldn’t help but remember the very first night, when he’d morphed into Homer after agreeing it made sense to wait. Or the first time, at the pool, when he’d barged in headfirst without stopping to think or plan.

If you counted Tidwell—and I wasn’t sure you should, but _if you did_ —that was three bad decisions, all completely on his shoulders. Taken together with the way he handled the group, it wasn’t terrible overall. But it wasn’t great, either.

I stood, walking over to rest a hand on his shoulder. “Good night, buddy,” I said. “Get some rest.”

He said nothing, and I turned and walked away, heading for my tent.

_Now what?_

I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think he was going to crack, but he was definitely crack _ing_ , present tense. And if it got any worse, we were going to be in serious trouble. I needed a backup plan, and I needed it fast, before Jake talked himself into something _really_ stupid.

Fortunately, I knew exactly who to ask for help.

 

*        *        *

 

<YEERK! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!>

<First of all, _no._ Second of all, not a Yeerk. And third of all, _fuck_ you, Elfangor. Fuck your bullshit, fuck your secrets, fuck your mysterious little plan. I want to know everything, and I want to know it _right now._ >


	18. Interlude 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a crazy week, and I need a few more days to get the proper update in acceptable shape. Here's a quick interlude, in the meantime.

 

**Interlude**

Her name was Aftran 927, and she finally, finally understood love.

She had _known_ about it for weeks, of course. Her host was a nine-year-old girl named Karen, and Karen loved many things. The feel of her stuffed unicorn, the sound of her father’s voice, the smell of the morning breeze off of the ocean and the slurp of the last, sugary gulp of milk after she finished her cereal. Love was the first thing Aftran had seen, when she opened Karen’s memories—love so omnipresent, so overflowing that it would have faded into the background, were it not so vibrant and alive.

But she had not _understood_ it—had not felt it, shared in it, reveled in it the way she had reveled in the sheer ecstasy of human sensation. Before Karen, Aftran had been small, so very small—had spent year after year as nothing more than a few strands of thought, a fragile web of memory. Her pool had lain in the barren northern reaches of the smallest continent, with no native Gedds and only the dull, rocklike ground-eaters for hosts. Their skulls had hardly any room for a Yeerk, and so Aftran had been little more than a whisper of personality, a ghost in the organic machine.

But humans! Their heads were so large, their bodies so complex. Aftran had swollen, in the taking, growing larger than she had ever been, larger than she had ever imagined being—feeling her _self_ expand as more and more of her siblings joined her, became her, released their names and took the name of Aftran for their own. She had grown so enormous that she almost did not mind the cut, the gap, the aching empty loneliness that was temporary independence—especially not when she first touched Karen’s brain and was rewarded with an experience brilliant beyond imagining.

The colors.

The sounds.

The effervescent tingle of sensation on skin— _her_ skin.

For the first time, Aftran was large enough to think, to know, to _be_ on her own, and for three whole days, she was drunk with the glory of living inside the paradise of Karen’s head. She gathered thousands of memories—what wonder, to be able to hold so many!—and carried them back to the pool in triumph, a feast of recollections for the coalescion’s joy.

On her second journey, she had been more sober.

But still—it was her purpose to consume, and so she soaked up Karen’s experiences like a sponge, sharing them every third day with her family, her larger self. Sometimes there were greater needs, and she suspended the fête for this or that as the coalescion reached ever outward through the web of humanity. But she was closer to satisfaction than most of her brethren—closer to the true joy, the true purpose of life.

There was only one false note in the symphony, and that was Karen.

Karen did not like Aftran. Karen was small, and afraid—did not understand that this was _her_ purpose, her reason—that she existed to be filled, that she was a vessel that had become a part of something larger, something beautiful. She cried within her head—sublime despair, exquisite sadness, and Aftran exulted in the sensation, but nevertheless, she wondered.

Bit by bit, she probed into the tiny human’s soul, seeking to understand. At first, she took a Yeerkish tack—were there sensations the child was missing? She spoke to her comrades, to the Controllers of Karen’s father and mother, and each agreed to greater contact—to more hugs, and kisses, and physical closeness. It pacified the parents, and the feelings were pleasant to all.

But still Karen wept. And so Aftran explored new avenues—new sensations and pleasures that Karen had never experienced. She tugged on every nerve—combined hormones and neurotransmitters in subtle, sensuous mixtures—orchestrated mad, fantastical dreams—fed her delicious, novel foods.

Nothing.

She began experimenting with giving Karen control, letting her move an arm, a leg—letting her say _sweet dreams_ with her own voice when she parted from her parents at night. It helped, a little, and yet still the little girl wept.

Curious, Aftran dug deeper, taking more and more of Karen’s memories into herself, delivering more and more of the human to her siblings in the pool. In the wild orgy of dissolution, she held the memories alongside those of a thousand other humans, but no great insight emerged. She returned to Karen each time different, each time wiser, and yet each time no less baffled.

Finally, she could bear the sadness no longer, and so she clamped down on her host, squeezing Karen into the smallest, darkest corner of their shared experience, seizing full and total control. For a time, the world was bright again, and Aftran danced through it, blissful and free, happy merely to live—to have arms which could move the universe, and eyes which could see for miles.

And then a day came when her impatience waned, when her curiosity swelled to the forefront again, and she drew the little girl out from the dark place to which she’d been banished. Sitting quietly in their room, she gave the reins to Karen, stepped back to see what the human child would do—

—and suddenly, without any particular revelation, she understood.

For Aftran, there was no boundary between possession and experience. To see a thing was to _be_ a thing—in the ecstasy of the pool, all was immediate, all was present, all was one. She moved in and out of the coalescion in a heartbeat rhythm, gathering fragments of the universe and bringing them back to her family, her siblings, her larger self. She was them, and they were her, and only together could they see the broader picture—the synthesis of ten thousand pairs of eyes, the control of ten thousand moving bodies. She walked the world on ten thousand pairs of feet, shaped it with twenty thousand hands, and when she was with Karen, she was but the tiniest sliver of herself, and she hungered always—more—more—more.

But Karen was not hungry. Karen wanted, but she did not take; she longed, but she could not consume. Her hunger was for a fullness she would never, ever taste, herself—the smiles of her parents, the laughter of her friends, even the contentment of the lump of fluff and fabric she’d named after her grandmother’s cat. She saw the trees dancing in the wind, and she loved them, and thus their imagined happiness gave her joy.

It was a strange thing, to Aftran—an alien thing. She stretched to feel it fully—to imagine an experience she could _not_ devour, a memory she could _not_ live, a sensation she could _not_ tap into, no matter where she dwelt. What would it even _mean_ , for such a thing to exist? How would one ever know it was real?

She dwelt on it for days—brought the question back to the coalescion, felt it echo through her siblings, watched it bounce off of their indifference. What concern had anyone, for experiences belonging to no one? It was a meaningless fallacy—not even valid enough to be counted as wrong.

Yet Aftran continued to wonder, and one day, she decided to try it.

It was not an easy experiment. She had to hide it from her comrades, waiting for an hour when they were busy, and would not notice odd behavior. When the moment came, she drove Karen deep into the dark, cutting the little girl off even from the sensations of sight and sound and touch. Working quickly, she assembled the ingredients in the kitchen, using the primitive human hotbox to heat her creation.

When it was finished, she pulled it out—allowed it to cool—covered it with sweet, sticky icing and decorated it with bright, edible sparkles. Cleaning up the mess, she placed the small cake on a plate, grabbed a knife and fork and napkin, and snuck back to their room, freezing the door in place with a tool she knew the little girl could not manipulate.

 _For Karen,_ she wrote, on a small, folded index card.

And then she vanished. Released her hold on the tiny human, and pulled back, away from her senses, away from control—shrinking down into the lonely darkness, blind and deaf and mute. She waited there for a timeless hour, wondering what the little girl would do, feeling the twisty pulse of love emerging for the first time from her _own_ soul. Karen would be happy, she decided—she would be happy, and Aftran wouldn’t look, ever—would let that hour belong to Karen, and Karen alone. It would be a private moment, an un-memory, the sort of thing that couldn’t properly be stolen, and that was how they would both know it had been real.

Or so she thought, until she groped slowly back into control, only to find that the little girl had taken the knife, and put out both of her own eyes. Weak, blind, and gasping with pain, it took Aftran three tries to undo the lock on the door, and call for help from her comrades.

They took Karen to the hospital, and Aftran to the pool. Entering the warm embrace of the coalescion, she let herself disappear, dissolving fully into the togetherness, becoming one with her siblings, carrying with her the memory of love. Together with her larger self, she lived it, drank of it, ate it and breathed it.

This love, she asked herself, in a chorus of ten thousand voices. What good is it?

It was not the only question she asked that night, in the grand roil of thought and memory. After all, there were so many lives to live, so many experiences to absorb. She spent longer than usual in the pool, while the doctors struggled to save Karen’s eyes—struggled, and failed, and eventually made the decision to terminate the host. There were more than enough humans to go around, these days, with more joining them every day as the inevitable expansion continued.

Eventually, a moment came when no other was called, and a head was thrust beneath the surface, and she reached out with the tiniest part of herself to brush against an ear. Slowly, agonizingly, she ceased to be _we_ and became once more _she_ , shivering with loss and delight as she traded the mosaic cacophony for the brilliant clarity of a single, solitary perspective. She reached for the mind, and it unfolded before her, its memories lit with wonder and light.

Her name was Aftran 928, and she knew absolutely nothing of love.


	19. Chapter 16: Rachel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... only 111,000 words in, and r!Animorphs passes the Bechdel test! Woo!
> 
> As always, please consider leaving reviews here or over at r/rational, where there are lots of opportunities for plot speculation and rationality discussion. Insofar as I'm writing this story well, I'd love to hear about what you enjoy; insofar as I've got room for improvement, I'd love for you to help me grow. Your comments keep me going (although this month I'm going to have less time than usual to reply).
> 
> Patreon at patreon dot com slash sabien, if you're interested; all proceeds going toward my pet project of building a rationality/worldsaving bootcamp for middle schoolers.

 

**Chapter 16: Rachel**

<Check, please.>

<In position. Ready to fire if necessary. Over.>

<It’s not going to _be_ necessary. I’m not even three feet away, over. >

<Neither of you do _anything_ unless Rachel or Marco says, over. >

<I can see you just fine, Rachel. Him, too. We’re still good, over.>

The voices of Ax, Cassie, Jake, and Marco, indistinguishable except for inflection as they filtered through my own inner monologue. We’d settled on alphabetical order as the obvious shortcut any time there was an all-call.

<Demorphing in thirty seconds. Over.>

I was in wasp morph, standing on the steel-tangle pile of a plush, velvet rug at the foot of a king-sized bed, trembling at the thunderous vibrations of the male Controller asleep and snoring above me. Cassie was somewhere nearby, her much-larger-and-more-terrifying tarantula hawk morph having just barely made it through the small hole we’d burned in the screen earlier in the day.

The others were all outside—Ax playing sniper from a distance with one of his Andalite shredders, Jake lurking in the copse of trees in the backyard, and Marco up above, keeping an eye on the situation with the stunning night vision of his barn owl morph. Garrett was back in the valley, taking care of Tidwell, and Tobias would be gone for at least a few more days, assuming he came back at all.

_It’s fine. Smooth sailing. No problem._

Wishing I could take a deep breath, I focused on my human form, feeling the changes begin almost immediately.

<Ninety seconds,> I broadcast. <Over.>

<Roger that, over.>

Luckily, the wasp’s eyes were useless in the dark. I could still _feel_ everything, though—the sudden sag as my hard, black carapace melted into soft, pink flesh. The shivering pops and cracks as my forelimbs split and shifted and swelled, four of them forming arms and legs while the other two withered and vanished. The strange itching sensation as my jawbone grew around my mandibles and my antennae split into a hundred thousand hairs.

<Still good. No movement. Over.>

Tidwell had given us a list of Controllers—everyone he knew and recognized who had been in the Yeerk pool the last time he’d fed. It was short, since the Yeerks had switched to stunning the hosts as soon as the slugs dropped from their ears; Tidwell hadn’t been able to mingle and talk the way he used to when they’d been held in cages.

But still. He’d recognized nearly a dozen of the people lying beside the pool before being knocked unconscious himself. Of that dozen, he’d known the addresses of two, and we’d been able to find three more online.

Of those five, only one lived alone in a house with no security system.

<Still good, over.>

I was almost two feet long, a horrific toddler-sized chimera of human and insect, before my clothes began to return from Z-space, the skin repatterning itself and lifting up and away like a sunburn. For once, I didn’t mind, because it also meant that the Dracon beam was coming back, emerging along with my fingers and palm as the last of the chitin disappeared from my arms.

<Here goes,> I broadcast, just before my ability to thought-speak fell away.

Moving slowly enough that my muscles began to groan, I rolled up off the floor and into a kneeling position, keeping the Yeerk weapon pointed at the sleeping Controller the whole way. Giving a silent thanks to the ridiculously thick carpet, I duck-walked my way around the bed, inch by agonizing inch, until I was close enough to lay a single finger—light as a feather—on the exposed skin of his shoulder.

Focusing, I began to acquire him. His snoring changed, and I tensed, but it was only the usual trance, its relaxing effect doing something to ease the buzzsaw drone coming out of his gaping mouth. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I spotted Cassie, a spindly nightmare shape as big across as my palm, clinging to the wall above the headboard.

<She’s got him,> someone said. Probably Marco, relaying the situation to the others. <No sign he’s waking up. Over.>

Tidwell had known the passwords for the pool entrance for four days into the future—passwords which the Yeerks almost certainly would have changed after our raid on the truck. Assuming that the new passwords had been set immediately, and that afterward the Yeerks would have reverted to their previous model of telling Controllers on their way out of the YMCA, then the man in the bed in front of me had gotten his last update some time between yesterday morning and yesterday evening—long enough ago that they would have had plenty of time to be encoded in the physical structures of his brain.

Which meant that I now had them, too—along with a body that everyone expected to see at the pool some time during the day after tomorrow.

In theory, Marco said, the Yeerks could have followed the connection—could have tracked who had been with Tidwell during his last pool visit, and upped the security around anyone who seemed particularly vulnerable.

But in practice, the Yeerks only had so many weapons, so many troops, so much attention to spare. They could mobilize in minutes, but they couldn’t actively guard everyone, and even Controllers had to sleep at some point.

“This is the standard,” Marco had said, as we prepared to leave the valley that afternoon. “Just like the truck—minimum risk, maximum power. We go where they aren’t looking, we bring as much firepower as we can, and we maximize the chances of at least _some_ of us getting out if things go wrong.”

It was a calculated move. The man might have changed his feeding schedule, or the Yeerks might have done more than just change out one set of passwords for another. There was a chance we’d come out with basically nothing. But the odds of danger were even lower, meaning we were unlikely to lose anything other than a little time.

Still holding the Dracon beam steady, I quietly crept back around to the foot of the bed, where I’d be out of the Controller’s line-of-sight if he awoke. With a smooth, silent motion, I rolled over onto my back, pointing the weapon up at the ceiling as I began to morph. I was no Cassie, but I managed to keep the process away from my arms until I was nearly halfway done, the cold black metal melting into the armor creeping its way upward from my elbows.

<Okay,> I said, as soon as I could thought-speak. <Let’s get out of here.>

<Cassie. I’ll cover you until you’re clear, over.>

<Counter that, says Jake. Cassie, Ax has it under control. Get out now; Rachel will finish up and follow. Over.>

<Translation: Jake loves Cassie more than he loves Rachel. Over. Also, this was Ax speaking, over.>

<Aximili speaking. I am being misrepresented, likely by Marco. Over.>

<Jake here. Both of you cut the nonsense—they’re not out yet.>

I waited for Marco’s final jab— _you forgot to say over, over—_ but it never came. A few seconds later, Cassie gave her personal all-clear, and as the final changes wound toward completion and my wings sputtered to life, I rose up from the carpet and followed. Five more minutes, and we were headed back toward the valley, pumping for altitude in the cold night air, each of us wearing the body of a different bird.

The whole thing had gone like clockwork—in and out in under half an hour, with no alarm and no reason to think the Yeerks would ever realize we’d been there. The part of me that itched for action was almost disappointed—had almost hoped the Controller would wake up and call for help, turning it into a fight.

But there would be plenty of fighting, soon enough. We’d chosen the battlefields for our last two missions, and as a result they’d been straightforward and easy, the complications with Illim and Tidwell notwithstanding. If we ran any more side quests, those would be easy, too.

All of that would change when we tried to take the pool. The Yeerks knew we were coming, sooner or later. They knew it was their weak point.

They would be ready.

They would be ready, and there would be blood.

 

*        *        *

 

“ _Nothing?”_ Marco asked, his tone incredulous.

I shook my head, and he swore, turning away to kick uselessly at a tuft of grass. Beside him, Jake dropped his head wearily into his hands, slowly rubbing at his temples as if fighting off a headache. On the other side of the circle, Ax stood still and alert, his main eyes watching me as his stalk eyes alternated between tracking Marco and scanning the rest of the clearing.

We were gathered around the firepit for what felt like the hundredth time—everybody except for Cassie, who was napping after having taken third shift watching Tidwell. The scruffy veteran was sitting on a log next to Garrett, still visibly digesting the experience of having watched a teenage girl transform into a middle-aged man and back again.

“He remembers the password that he gave last time,” I clarified. “Remembers saying it out loud. ‘Moonlight whistle cinnamon fourteen Odric.’ Odric—that’s the name of his Yeerk. But nobody ever _told_ him to say it. The Yeerk just produced the words on the spot, and he didn’t have access to them ahead of time.”

The man I had acquired was named Greg Morales. He was an accountant for one of the financial firms downtown, and he’d been taken two weeks ago, during his annual checkup at the hospital. And for a brief time—long enough for me to dig through his memory to find out everything he knew about Yeerk security—there had been two copies of him, neither in control of its own fate.

<The words seem consistent with basic generative cryptography,> Ax said cautiously. <Some rule, known to the Yeerk but unknown to the host, which allows the Yeerk to construct an appropriate set of responses based on relevant input.>

“But the hosts can’t—what, I dunno— _hear_ it?” Garrett asked.

<The exchange is one-way,> Ax explained. <The Yeerk may access any part of the host’s brain structure, whether physical or psychic. The same is not true in reverse. Only concepts which the parasite chooses to transmit are available to the host.>

“Why a rule?” Jake asked. He glanced at Marco, who was now standing outside of the circle, staring off toward the slope on the far side of the valley. “Why couldn’t it just be a particular set of passwords, like before? Only this time, they’re not letting the hosts hear them?”

<Perhaps it could. The nature of communication in the pool is not well understood—I do not believe even Seerow was permitted to make observations of independent Yeerks in their natural state outside of the laboratory. I would expect there to be difficulty in coordinating information exchange of the sort that would allocate specific passwords to appropriate Yeerks, and they certainly would not have a single set. One common algorithm for generating correct responses has the benefit of being highly transferrable while also allowing for variety and uniqueness, making the system less vulnerable to external eavesdropping.>

He paused. <Eaves?> An image flashed into my head, of the join between a slanted roof and the wall supporting it, along with an impression of confusion.

“Let it go,” Garrett advised in a soft murmur. “Words don’t ever make sense.”

“Long story short,” I said, pulling us back on track. “We don’t have the passwords, and we can’t get them, which means we’re back to square one. Right?”

There was silence as I looked around the circle.

“Okay,” Jake said. “Options.” He began raising fingers one at a time. “We can try morphing into known Controllers directly, and bluffing our way through. We can try morphing into chiggers or some other bug, and getting under a Controller’s skin, and see if that bypasses the bio-filter. We can try taking the person at the desk, and unlocking the door ourselves. We can try a brute-force attack. We can try digging up from underneath—Ax figures that the shield only goes down about twenty feet, and we know the bottom is open. Or we could just give up, and go after the hospital.”

“The desk option won’t work,” Tidwell said, his voice still hoarse and gravelly. He had slammed his chest against something hard during the crash, and had been speaking in whispers for the past couple of days to avoid worsening the pain. “They’ve got cameras on the front room, and if either the girl behind the desk or the guys behind the cameras smell anything fishy, they hit the panic button and the door in the shield disappears.”

“Could we—I dunno—rewire the video somehow?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t work like it does in the movies.”

“What about the Ch—”

Tidwell turned to look curiously at Garrett, who had broken off mid-sentence and was now staring at the patch of ground between his feet, his expression slightly stricken as his fists mangled the fabric of his t-shirt.

“And Ax says the bio-filters aren’t likely to be fooled into thinking a human morph is a Controller,” Jake said, his voice a hair louder than before. “For one, the fake Yeerk tissue has the same genetic makeup as the construct, and for another, there’s not enough of it.”

He shot another glance over at Marco, and I put it together—Marco was currently in his morph armor, which meant he was probably in the middle of giving Garrett a lecture on why Tidwell didn’t need to know about the Chee’s hologram technology.

Not that it would have worked, anyway. We _maybe_ could have convinced Erek that forcibly acquiring someone wasn’t violence, but I doubt we could have convinced him that our reasons for doing so weren’t going to hurt anyone.

“For that matter, the chigger plan is probably out, too. If it can see through somebody’s skull, it can catch an insect buried half a millimeter deep.”

“So what do we—”

“Hang on,” Marco interrupted, whirling around and striding back into the circle. “Hang on.” He fixed Ax with his gaze, a look of urgent curiosity on his face. “Ax—the construct. If a Yeerk infested a construct, could it—would it be able to access the original mind? Could it read my thoughts, through the morph?”

Ax’s upper third settled down onto the ground—a gesture we’d learned to understand meant deep thought, like a human putting a hand on her chin. <I am uncertain,> he said, after a long pause. <But my immediate suspicion is—no, it would not. There is insufficient neural mass for the false Yeerk tissue to perform full cognition. It would seem to be little more than a set of levers and sensors, controlled from without. There is no information stored there for the Yeerk to peruse.>

“What about control? Would the Yeerk be able to _control_ the construct?”

Another long pause. I did a quick scan of the circle—Jake looking darkly intent, Tidwell off-balance, Garrett openly curious. <I believe so,> Ax answered cautiously. <The interference between Cassie-based morphs indicates that the unitary host-construct dependency is not perfect. But if it came to a struggle—I would expect the true Yeerk to dominate. That is what it evolved to do, after all.> He rose up into his usual centaur-stance, adding <I am only weakly confident, though.>

Marco’s shoulders slumped fractionally, and he sighed. “Figures.”

“What—”

“Stupid idea, anyway.” He straightened again, looking around the circle. “I thought, since we can’t morph Yeerk for some reason—what if we used a real one? What if one of us let Illim—you know—infest us. That’d get us through the bio-filter, probably. But if it can just control the construct—and besides, there’s still the passwords—”

“Wait,” Tidwell croaked. “You’re just trying to get inside the shield? That’s it, it doesn’t matter after that?”

Marco frowned. “Jake?”

We hadn’t yet reached any sort of final decision about what Tidwell was and was not to know. He knew we could morph, obviously, and he’d helped us identify some of the weirder stuff we’d stolen from the truck, at least by name. But we’d been careful not to say anything about the stockpiles of sodium that Marco and Ax had located using some circumspect internet searches and a few judicious phone calls. “Not exactly,” Jake said slowly. “But if you have ideas…”

He gestured broadly at the rest of the circle.

“Well,” Tidwell continued, his brow furrowed. “I don’t know about sneaking. What I’m thinking, you’d have a _lot_ of eyes on you, at least at first. But you’ll be inside.”

 

*        *        *

 

I watched with awe—and no small amount of envy—as Marco worked through the implications, starting with the fact that he wasn’t holding three rocks, then gradually growing more and more certain as he flashed through a series of numbers, finally ending with a grim conclusion as he tried to move his feet and found himself blocked. It all happened in a matter of seconds, each individual thought like a frame in a movie, a page in a flipbook.

<Rachel?> he asked, inside of our shared head.

Marco was _smart._

<Yeah.>

I felt him gather his resolve—actually _felt_ it, as if it were my own body and I were steeling myself—felt the sudden stain of dread and his iron refusal to yield to it.  <So, am I dead?> he asked, brusquely. <The real me?>

<No.>

<Then what—>

There was a rush of heat in his—our—face, as his mind went almost immediately _there_ , and he backpedaled in furious embarrassment, his thoughts a whirl of self-recrimination and baleful resentment. <Having fun?> he asked, bitterly.

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t, really—the experience of Marco’s consciousness was too distracting. It was hypnotic, mesmerizing—even as he formed words for my benefit, the rest of him was busy wrestling with itself, arguing back and forth as impressions and emotions churned beneath the surface.

There was confusion, as his brain continued to throw up guesses as to what was going on, and mortification that I had seen his first guess—that that had _been_ his first guess—

There was anger at me, for the intrusion, coupled with accusations of hypocrisy as he remembered seriously considering this exact course of action—though of course, he’d been planning to morph _Jake_ , not me—

There was shame as he realized that I could see his true opinion of me, and a surge of defensiveness as he marshaled his justifications. There was a sort of defiant hardening as he prepared himself to shrug off my hurt, my anticipated anger. And deep, deep down, so quiet I almost missed it, there was a tiny note of sad, shy insecurity—fear of my laughter, my scorn, that his opinion of me _wouldn’t_ hurt, that I was unassailable and wouldn’t care, that being pretty and cool and athletic and popular actually _were_ the things that mattered, and it made no difference if you were smart and right if you were also short and lonely and awkward—

—a wild, secret, narcissistic hope that I _had_ morphed him in order to see his—

—a wave of self-loathing—

—what’s going on with the _war_ —

—fucking Rachel, if you’re going to mindrape me, you might as well _say_ something—

<Sorry,> I broke in, a stone dropping into the stream of consciousness. <I just—>

It was electric—like the insane, universe-shattering moment when I had dissolved into the minds of Erek and Alloran and Visser Three. Only, instead of a single, incomprehensible lightning strike, this was a continuous current—a fascinating, captivating, steady magnetic pull. I had known Marco for years, but it wasn’t until this moment that I’d realized what Marco was _like._

<I have a confession to make,> I said, before I could lose my nerve. <And I figured I’d try it out on you, first.>

 

*        *        *

 

“I already know,” he said, a strange glint in his eyes, his expression cold and impenetrable.

It was the real Marco this time, sitting on the edge of the boulder, looking down at me. I’d gone searching for him as soon as I’d demorphed—had found him in what I now knew was his favorite spot in the valley.

“What? But—how—”

I broke off, an embarrassed flush spreading across my cheeks.

_Of course._

Marco had _my_ DNA, too.

“How long?” I asked, feeling a strange sense of distance as I looked up at him. I knew exactly how fast those thoughts ran—if he’d known all along, it meant that he’d already decided not to tell Jake and the others—

“As it happens, about half an hour,” he said. He continued to hold my gaze, letting the silence stretch out, giving nothing away. Waiting.

—for me to try to explain?

—for me to beg him not to tell?

—for my apology?

But he would have already heard all of those. From the other Rachel, the copy of me that lived inside him somewhere. Would have already heard, and considered, and made up his mind.

Was this a test, then? To see if I was still stupid? Still not able to think things through? Not able, as the other Marco had put it, to _get out of my own fucking head for a minute?_

“We’ve both already had this conversation once,” I said slowly. “So you already know that I know I screwed up. And I already know you think that’s not enough.”

Marco gave no answer, his expression still inscrutable. I knew what he was thinking, though, behind that rigidly controlled face— _damn straight it’s not enough. Cassie’s parents are dead, and my Dad’s a Controller, and NONE OF THAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU’D USED YOUR FUCKING BRAIN FOR ONE GODDAMN SECOND—_

“And you don’t care about anything I have to say,” I continued, “because stupid people promising not to be stupid is—it’s a promise they can’t keep. Because they can’t tell when they’re about to be stupid. Not in time to stop.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“So what this really boils down to is whether or not you think having me around helps us win. Whether you think I—whether you think I’m a liability. Whether telling Jake what I did will make us stronger or weaker, as a team—whether it’s better for him to have the full picture, or not. Whether I’ve actually—what, grown? Updated?—on the way I do things, since three weeks ago.”

“And?” he asked, after a long silence.

I took a deep breath. “And so I’m asking you for advice,” I said. “I need a second opinion, and you’re better at this stuff than me. What do _you_ think I should do?”

The question hung in the air between us, thick and heavy and explosive. For nearly thirty seconds, Marco and I stared directly into each other’s eyes, with me trying to imagine what he was imagining about me, and him doing—whatever it was his brain does. I couldn’t even begin to guess.

“You know what the difference was, between that first night at the pool and these last two missions?” he asked suddenly.

I swallowed. “No,” I answered honestly. “I mean, there’s plenty—but I don’t know which bit you think is important.”

“We didn’t act like that first mission was safe,” he said. “It _wasn’t_ safe, and we knew it, and Jake went in anyway. And then I followed him, even though it was stupid, and then you went in afterward even though _that_ was stupid.”

I said nothing, because I didn’t know what I was supposed to say.

“And it was because—because—because—” He broke off, shook his head, and started over. “Jake went in there _mad._ He didn’t _care_ if he got killed. He wasn’t thinking. And then I followed him because—”

Again, a pause. Again, a restart, this time with a tight grimace. “I didn’t care about anything except getting him out. I think, if I’d died doing it, I—it would have been okay. It would have been a good trade. I mean, not really, because God help us all if you guys had to run this little army without me, but—”

I nodded. I understood. “It would have _felt_ okay,” I said, my voice thrumming as if I were about to break into tears. “Like, it wouldn’t have been right, but—but it would’ve been _right.”_

“Worth it,” Marco said, nodding back. “That’s the thing, right? Some missions, they’re worth it.”

“Like Elfangor,” I said, feeling my throat close up.

Maybe I _would_ cry.

“Yeah,” Marco said slowly.

I noticed—something. A sudden distance, maybe, as if Marco had been drawing closer and closer and then had turned around at the last second. As if we’d been doing a paired gymnastics routine, and one of us had stumbled.

Was it Elfangor? Had I said something wrong?

“And the thing is,” Marco continued, “it hurts, sometimes, to think about which missions _aren’t_ worth it. Like my dad. My dad, who’s already broken, who’s been messed up ever since my mom died, he’s been off in this private little nightmare world all alone, and I haven’t been able to help, and now he’s—”

He broke off for a third time, this time giving a nonchalant little shrug. “Whatever,” he said, the emotion suddenly gone from his voice. “It’s just shitty, you know? To realize that we could do it, probably, we could _probably_ rescue my dad even though there’s a Bug fighter up there over my house, but it wouldn’t be _worth the risk._ Because right now, we’re more important than my dad. Me, Jake, Cassie, Tobias.” He made a strange face. “You. What we know, what we can do. You don’t sacrifice your queen for a pawn.”

Pressing both of his hands against the boulder, he leaned forward and slid off, dropping down to the ground, his feet crunching against the dead leaves and twigs. Straightening, he looked up at me—actually up, his head almost a foot lower than mine even with the gentle slope of the hill.

“You sacrifice your queen for a queen, though,” he said. “What Tidwell came up with, this morning—I’m pretty sure I can turn it into a plan. A real plan, one that can actually work. But.”

He tilted his head, his eyes narrowing slightly as he sized me up. “But it isn’t safe. Not by a long shot. Way I figure it, we get something like a 50% chance of taking out the pool. Whole thing, top to bottom. Maybe we even manage to steal the shield while we’re at it.”

He paused for a single heartbeat, spoke the next words in a light and casual tone. “But we also get like a 90% chance of at least one of us dying. And from where _I’m_ standing, the person we can most afford to lose is _you_.”

 

*        *        *

 

“There’s never going to be a better moment,” I pointed out. “Right now, they don’t know about Ax, they don’t know about storing things in morph, they don’t know about using thought-speak as a weapon, they don’t know that there’s a weakness in the bio-filter—”

“A _possible_ weakness,” Jake corrected, his voice tight. “ _If_ Marco’s right. And that’s assuming they don’t gun you down at the door, or just stun you and put Illim in stasis right there—”

“It’s already almost impossible,” I said, cutting him off. “And it’s only going to get worse as they figure more and more stuff out. They didn’t even _have_ codes a year ago—how do you think they came up with that password scheme? The more humans we let them take, the harder it’s going to get to turn this thing around. This is worth it.”

“ _Nothing’s_ worth losing one of us. There are only _seven_ of us, against all of them.”

“Tobias is out there,” Marco reminded him. “We have the blue box—we can recruit. We can’t fight a war if we’re not willing to take risks.”

Jake didn’t like it. Cassie _really_ didn’t like it. But together, Marco and I talked them down—talked them into it.

The rest of the day was a whirlwind of preparation. I wrote three letters—to Sara, Jordan, and my mom, explaining. I convinced Cassie to deliver them, if anything terrible happened.

“The Yeerks already know we’re human,” I said. “They’re staking out our houses. It won’t hurt anything.”

She agreed, giving me a strange look as she took the three small scraps of paper. I had the feeling there was something she wasn’t saying—maybe _several_ somethings—but I didn’t ask. There wasn’t time.

Marco, Ax, and Garrett left to get the sodium at sundown, along with a handful of materials Tidwell had specified. He wasn’t much of a demolitions expert, but he’d picked up a few tricks here and there, and he knew a way to create a slow-permeable membrane—to set up a kind of fuse, so that it would take the water a few minutes to soak through to the metal inside. With luck, that would give Garrett the time he needed to get out of the pool and get clear.

There was a painful half-hour where Jake insisted on having a stilted, uneven conversation that never quite got to the point. Eventually, I figured out what he wanted, and put it to him directly.

“You’re trying to figure out if I’ll let you acquire me, right? In case I die?”

I didn’t think there was much of a chance that anybody would be able to resurrect me out of a temporary morph, but it didn’t cost me anything, so I shrugged and let him do it. For a brief moment, I worried about him pulling the memory trick and digging through my head, but that wasn’t really Jake’s style. I went ahead and acquired him back, just to make the whole thing feel less awkward, but I didn’t bother morphing into him. Jake wasn’t like Marco—if he had something to say, he’d say it to your face.

I _did_ go ahead and morph into Marco’s body again—that night, in my hut, after everyone else went to sleep. I didn’t unlock his consciousness, just played around with being a boy for a while. It was strange—I wasn’t _scared_ , exactly, but I was very, extremely, completely aware that it might be my last night on Earth. I didn’t want to miss out on my last chance for a unique experience, though even in the dark my cheeks burned when I thought about what Marco would say if he ever found out.

If I _did_ live—

 _No,_ I thought to myself. _No hopes, no promises. The mission, first._

I hadn’t realized just how much the guilt had been weighing on me—how different it would feel, to suddenly have a shot at redemption. Unable to sleep, I morphed into the barn owl—the same one Marco had used to keep watch on the mission the night before—and spiraled up into the sky.

It was a clear, beautiful night, with the sliver of moon outlining the mountains and the lights of the city sparkling and shimmering as the earth bled heat into the atmosphere. I drifted through the air for an hour, stopping to peer into the windows of my mom’s house.

They were asleep—my mom in her room, my sisters in their bunk beds. Their faces were calm and relaxed, with no sign of the struggle that would be raging in each of their heads. There was no alien technology littering the house—no guns, no maps—just the tiny blinking light of a tracker on each wrist.

None of them would be at the pool tomorrow. I had made a point of keeping track of their feeding schedule, and they had all visited earlier, in the afternoon, right around the time that Marco and I had been morphing into each other.

I wanted to say goodbye—could feel the words forming in the back of my mind, the impulse to speak. But I ignored it. Never again.

The others were still gone when I returned to the valley. Demorphing, I rolled back into bed, mixing in a few hours of restless sleep with my tossing and turning.

And then it was morning. I awoke to the smell of bacon—courtesy of Erek—cooking on a pan over the campfire. Marco, Ax, Garrett, and Tidwell were off in a corner of the field, unpacking the chunks of sodium one by one and carefully sealing them up in foam containers. Jake was doing the cooking—he muttered something under his breath and didn’t look me in the eye—which left Cassie to talk to as I ate my breakfast scramble.

“Are you okay with this?” I asked haltingly, after a minute of silence.

“With what?”

I shrugged. “If this works, a lot of people are going to die.”

“I’m not some unrealistic hippie, you know.”

I winced. “Sorry. I _do_ know. I guess it’s just—”

“What?”

 _It’s just that we’ve got to keep your conscience alive, since none of the rest of us seem to have one._ “Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.”

We each chewed quietly for a moment. Then Cassie spoke.

“I volunteered to beat you up,” she said. “After you morph. When we have to make it look like you’ve been in a car accident.”

I blinked. “Um,” I said.

“Don’t worry, I won’t make it too bad. Can’t have too many fresh cuts, after all, when you’re supposed to have had three days to heal.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Cassie and I had been best friends for years, but in the past few weeks—

— _since you got her parents killed—_

—we hadn’t really talked much at all.

Was it possible to drift apart that quickly? I certainly couldn’t remember ever feeling quite this awkward around Cassie before.

But then again, our talks had usually been about horse tranquilizers, or Social Studies quizzes, or my occasional attempts to get her to dress in something other than overalls. We didn’t exactly have a lot of practice with last-meals-before-execution, or what to do with the fate of the world.

“Cassie,” I began. “Your parents—”

“Not your fault,” she said, the words sounding practiced and tired. “If anybody’s to blame, it’s me. I could’ve stayed to fight for my mother. Could’ve knocked her out before she called in my dad. Could’ve made one of you go with me to the Gardens in the first place. Plenty of things I could have done different. Done better.”

I winced again, my breakfast sitting like lead in my stomach. “We’re going to make them pay,” I said quietly.

“Oh, not you, too,” Cassie grumbled. “Come on—do you really believe that killing a whole bunch of _them_ makes up for _them_ killing a whole bunch of _us?_ Do you think it’s going to make me feel any better at _all?”_

“Yes,” I said, softening the word with a shrug. “I do. I think you don’t _want_ it to make you feel better, but I think it _will._ They’re bad guys. You don’t have to feel guilty about it.”

She was quiet for a long moment. “No,” she said. “I still do. Because it’s _not their fault._ Don’t you see? Their whole species—this is how they _live._ It’s all they know. It’s the only way they get to see, to hear, to smell, to taste. Elfangor—I asked him a little more about it, and he said, the first time they realized it wasn’t the Gedds—that the Gedds weren’t even intelligent, that it was those little slugs in the pools—”

She paused, and shook her head. “They’re stuck in those pools their whole lives. Their whole lives, except the one or two lucky ones who manage to grab a passing, stupid animal. And then even then, they only get three days before they have to give up—let go and drop back into the pool to feed, and who _knows_ when they’ll get another chance? Some pools have a _million_ Yeerks in them.”

She fixed me with a steady, searching look. “You going to tell me that you wouldn’t try to get out?” she asked. “That you wouldn’t push back? Fight? Maybe even do a little enslaving? If nobody had ever told you about equality, and freedom, and justice?”

“Even if they hadn’t heard of that stuff before,” I pointed out, “they’ve heard of it _now._ They could _stop_. But they don’t. They keep going, even though every single host is screaming.”

“ _We_ kept going for hundreds of years,” Cassie countered. “Hundreds of years of slavery. Built up all kinds of stories about how it was God’s will, how it was the natural state of things, how—how—how the _black man was inferior_ , how he was _happier_ with all that responsibility taken off his shoulders.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, and—not for the first time—I wondered about her family’s history, and about why I felt like I couldn’t ask.

“I don’t want to write off a whole species, just because they’re a couple of hundred years behind us on the learning curve,” she said, her voice sounding firmer and more confident as she went on. “I don’t want to write off a whole species just because they haven’t figured it out in the _two years_ since they discovered that there was _anybody different_ _out there at all_. _”_

“I don’t, either,” I said, wondering as I did whether it was true or not. “But I’m not willing to sacrifice _our_ whole species while they figure it out.”

She shrugged. “Problem is, it’s not our species and their species. It’s just people. Each and every individual person, each making their own choice. They think they can get what they want through slavery. You think you can get what you want by killing. I think—I don’t _know_ what I want, but it’s _not this._ ”

She fell silent, and together we chewed our food, side by side in the corner of the little clearing. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, teetering on the edge of telling her—of confessing, of throwing myself on her mercy—

“Thing is,” she said, so softly I could barely hear. “Maybe I’m glad they’re gone. Because deep down, I think we haven’t—I think things are going to get a _lot_ worse.”

Straightening, she looked down at me. “Good luck, Rachel,” she said.

And then she turned and walked away.

 

*        *        *

 

When Illim took control, I didn’t feel fear. I didn’t feel anger. I didn’t feel frustration or helplessness or relief.

Instead, I felt—taut. Like an arrow on the draw. A tiger, ready to spring. A boulder, just barely balanced at the top of a cliff.

There had been too much talk. I wanted to _act_ , and the plan was finally, finally in motion.

“Illim,” Jake said, his voice cold and formal. My eyes darted toward him without my input, and I felt a vague mental pressure as Illim scrambled around inside Aaron Tidwell’s clone-copy brain and found nothing—no memories except the past ten minutes, during which a bear had gently battered his face and body.

“There was a malfunction in your stasis cylinder,” Jake continued. “It occurred overnight, and we didn’t notice it until now.”

Lies, of course. Ax had carefully drained the power, using the sensors on the side to track the health of the slug within.

“You must already be starving.”

“What is this?” Illim cried, using my voice—Tidwell’s voice. “This body—what—”

“We have decided to spare your life, Yeerk,” Jake said, allowing a hint of haughtiness to creep into his tone. “You are inside of a morph—one of our commandos, wearing a copy of your old host’s body.”

I felt the clawing-searching sensation again as Illim dug through Tidwell’s mind, blocked at every turn by the morphing tech’s control system—the protocols that were keeping the human brain dormant and obedient. “This body—it—”

“You are in control,” Jake said simply. “Our commando couldn’t take over if she tried.” He nodded, and—as planned—I gave a mental heave, struggled to dislodge Illim’s grip on our shared mind. There was a moment in which it almost seemed to work, and I felt Tidwell’s right hand curl into a fist. But then the Yeerk buckled down, forcing me back into submission.

“The body has no memories because it is only ten minutes old. It is damaged to lend credibility to your story.”

“What story?”

Jake shrugged. “Whatever story allows you to return to your pool. Our commando volunteered to deliver you there, as long as you make every effort to preserve the secret of her identity.” He leaned in, his eyes somehow empty and soulless—looking nothing like Jake’s at all. “You should note that you have absolutely no control over her morphing power,” he added darkly. “She can demorph at will, and if she does—well.” He smiled—a cold, mirthless twisting of the lips. “You get to see what Z-space is like, firsthand.”

We had timed it as exactly as we could. By Ax’s estimate, Illim had barely an hour left to live—if it refused to cooperate, or if it turned out our assumptions about control were wrong, Marco would stun me from behind and I would demorph after it died.

If it played along instead—

“You have about one hour to make your way back to the pool,” Jake said. “To talk your way inside. I believe your passwords are out of date, and your superiors think you’re either captured or dead. They’ll be suspicious. You’ll have to be quite convincing.”

“Why—”

“Tick tock, Illim. Time’s running out. Do you really want to spend the last minutes of your life asking irrelevant questions?”

He turned, stepping out of the way to reveal that the trail we were standing on ended just a few hundred feet away, emerging into a parking lot on the edge of town. There was a brief, horrible moment of hesitation, in which it seemed that Illim would stop and think and the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.

But then I felt my body shudder as a spasm of whatever pain the Yeerk was feeling tore through our head. We stumbled, and when we climbed back to our feet, we were running.

<You,> Illim said, the voice echoing across my thoughts. <Are you there? Can you hear me?>

<Yes,> I answered, as we burst out of the trees and into the sunlight.

<Which way?>

Illim’s voice was tight with fear and desperation, and I felt its control relax enough for me to point. Without a moment’s hesitation, it spurred our body back into motion, our shoes slapping loudly as we ran down the asphalt.

<You may want to slow down,> I cautioned. <We’re several miles away, and you should pace yourself.>

<No!> Illim shouted. <This body is a spare! You’ll just regenerate it! If we don’t make it to the pool, I will _die! >_

I could feel the results of the Yeerk’s efforts—the way that blood pumped more freely, adrenaline trickling out in a steady stream, the heart and lungs working together at exactly maximum output.

<Why?> it demanded, <Why are you doing this? If you wanted me to live, why not deliver me in the cylinder?>

<The cylinder was completely broken,> I said. <It would’ve killed you to keep you in it. This was the only way.>

<But _why? >_ Illim shouted. <Why—ahhhhh—why did you not just kill me? Why this—this _torture—_ >

<Torture? I’m saving your _life._ >

<You’re after something! You’re trying to—to infiltrate—to sabotage—>

<Do you see any weapons?> I asked. <Notice anything that could pose even the tiniest threat to your stupid pool? I’m _not like you._ I’m trying to be _nice._ >

<Others—hhggggrrrr, _no_ —buried in my skin, my hair—insects—>

<Bio-filter, remember?>

The conversation continued as we ran, Illim driving Tidwell’s body harder than I thought possible as it searched for the motive, the lie. I stuck to the story, refusing to give detail, answering most of its questions with the mental equivalent of a shrug.

Occasionally, the hunger pangs would be so intense that they would cause us to trip, to stumble. Once, it happened just as we were crossing over a curb, and the resulting fall knocked out two of Tidwell’s teeth and broke our nose. But the Yeerk simply shut down the pain signals and hoisted us to our feet, driving us forward even faster.

<I need a phone—a comm—>

<We’re only three-quarters of a mile out. You might as well run—by the time they pinpoint your location, you could have already made it.>

<Nnnnggggggggaauuhhh! How do I know that you—>

<Fine. Don’t believe me. Go ahead and die. In fact, why don’t I demorph right n—>

<No!>

We were getting closer—close enough that the streets were starting to fill with people, Controllers on their way to or from the pool. A few of them gaped at us as we ran by, blood streaming freely down Tidwell’s face. “Illim!” the Yeerk cried out. “Emergency! Illim! Do not interfere!”

<Got a good story planned?> I asked. <It would be a shame to keel over in the lobby.>

<I was— _tsssssssss!_ I was seized by Andalites! Held in the woods! I barely escaped—I don’t know how! >

<How will they know you’re not an impostor?>

<There are passwords, you idiot! And the bio-filter.>

<And how do I know _you_ won’t betray _me? >_

<I am _dying!_ I don’t have time for revenge games! >

Rounding a corner, I/we saw the low, squat façade of the YMCA, less than a quarter of a mile away. I felt Illim trying to squeeze another drop of speed out of Tidwell’s body, but we were already running as fast as we could, his heart pumping dangerously fast, his breath a ragged whistle.

I didn’t dare trying to thought-speak out loud, but I knew the others were there, somewhere—in the trees, or up above, Jake and Cassie and Marco, paralleling me on three sides. In a moment, they would peel off, so as not to alert the pool and make the irregular situation even more suspicious.

It was laughable—a dream, a hope, a hail-Mary—a terrible plan, made barely possible by the addition of two critical factors:

Illim wanted to live _._

And I was willing to die.

“Help!” Tidwell’s voice cried, as we neared the door. “Help! Cirrus, Socrates, particle, decibel, Visser! I’m dying!”

We reached for the handle, just barely avoiding a final tumble on the last stair, and yanked open the door. “Cirrus!” Illim repeated. “Socrates, particle, decibel, Visser! Let me in, I’m dying!”

Behind the desk, the young attendant’s eyes had narrowed. She was already in motion, slapping a hand down on a hidden button behind the counter and drawing a gun as she rose smoothly to her feet.

“No!” Illim shouted, staggering to a halt, holding both of Tidwell’s hands up in front. “Please! Cirrus, Socrates, particle, decibel, Visser! I’m part of the Bastion group—I was captured—escaped—please, I’m _starving,_ I don’t have much _time—_ ”

“Control,” said the attendant, her voice steady. “Orders?”

Illim continued to beg as the attendant cocked her head, listening to something we couldn’t hear. “Strip,” she commanded, gesturing with the gun.

Exhausted, bleeding, barely able to stand—somehow, Illim managed to force Tidwell’s limbs into motion, tugging our sweat-soaked clothes over our head and off of our sweaty legs. “Cirrus,” it said weakly, turning in a circle, arms still raised. “Socrates, particle, decibel, Visser. I’m not an Andalite, I’m a Yeerk, _please._ The fugue—it’s already started—”

The attendant’s eyes widened, and something like sympathy flickered across her face. “Control,” she said again. “Seems clear. Front door secure—I can see Urdash’s squad through the glass—”

She broke off abruptly, again seeming to listen, and then nodded. “Roger.” She pointed at the door. “Go!”

Illim didn’t wait to be told twice. We darted forward as the attendant bent over the desk, keying in a code before pressing the buzzer. Ripping open the door, we stumbled inside and began to run again.

I could only catch glimpses as we lumbered down the hallway, Illim still firmly in control of our head and eyes. But from what I saw, the interior of the building had been completely rearranged. Where before there had been basketball courts and arts-and-crafts rooms, the doors now opened onto huge, bustling labs and manufactories, with dozens of small, orange, eight-limbed aliens skittering across tables and desks and piles of unfinished machinery. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a half-built Bug fighter, and then in the next room, a series of tall, cylindrical tanks filled with bubbling green liquid.

Reaching the stairwell, we half-ran, half-fell down the steps, passing another set of doors which opened onto a barracks room stuffed completely full of Hork-Bajir. Bursting through the door into the basement hallway, we ran straight into a squad of eight armed men wearing riot gear.

“Cirrus!” shouted Illim once again, Tidwell’s voice going hoarse. “Socrates—”

“We know,” snapped one of the men. “Explain.”

“I _can’t_ ,” Illim groaned. “The fugue, the _fugue_ —please, I have only minutes—”

The men exchanged glances, and a low keening groan tore its way out of Tidwell’s throat as his limbs began to twitch. Sagging, we fell against one of the men and were lifted bodily by three others.

“To the bio-filter,” the first man said.

Moving with smooth efficiency, the group carried us over to the pool entryway. It, too, had been changed, the doors built outward into the hallway and reinforced with thick, shiny metal. Sliding them open, the squad dumped us unceremoniously inside.

It was like an airlock, about six feet on a side, the walls covered in tiny holes and painted a dull, angry red. We sat motionless for maybe ten seconds, our chest heaving, until we heard a small chime and the inner set of doors swung open.

_Should I demorph now?_

_No—Illim will notice, sound the alarm._

A second squad of men were waiting just inside, four of them with arms free while the other four stood further back, their weapons trained on the airlock. The first group heaved us up, dragging us over to the pier.

<Almost free, Yeerk. Will you return the favor?>

It was the moment of truth.  If they stunned me now, I might never wake up in time.  If they killed me—

“This body,” Illim gasped, as they held us horizontal, our head out over the water. “Don’t stun it. I ran—the heart—I think you’ll kill it, if you stun it.”

And then, with a final surge of gratitude, I felt the Yeerk dislodge—a strange sensation, like a thousand tiny Band-Aids being pulled off every fiber of my mind. There was pain, in my ear—pain like a drill, and then I heard a tiny _plop_ as the slug dropped out and vanished beneath the surface.

They dumped me on the side of the pool, a cut-string puppet, alongside all the unconscious prisoners. I felt weak—nauseous—my heart still hammering through my chest, my limbs as dull and heavy as lead. It was a good thing that the next phase of the plan didn’t require me, because I couldn’t have gotten up if my life depended on it.

_All right. Easy part’s over._

Forcing myself to focus, I began to demorph, straining with all my might to localize the change to just the tiniest patch of my body—the palm of my right hand. At first, nothing happened, and then came the familiar tingle, not just in my palm but across my whole right side—

— _it’ll be enough, let it be enough—_

—and then—

—like a chorus of angels—

<Garrett. Hello? Did we make it? Over.>

<Rachel, are we in?>

<Yes,> I thought wearily, feeling the tiniest tickle as the pair of bugs launched themselves away from my palm, where they had emerged from Z-space. <We’re in.>


	20. Chapter 17: Garrett

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Surprise medical emergency = surgery tomorrow morning = this update was somewhat accelerated and the next update may be more than two weeks away. I'm already working on it, but who knows whether I'll be able to make progress over the next fortnight. I am NOT intending to take a long hiatus until after the end of this cycle of chapters, though (we still have Cassie, Tobias, Ax, and Esplin, barring major character deaths or additions).
> 
> As always, please please pretty please share as many thoughts as you're willing to type out! I've read and enjoyed every comment on this story so far, as well as every bit of discussion and commentary over on r/rational. And of course, if you feel like supporting me on patreon dot com slash sabien, that is also immensely appreciated.

 

**Chapter 17: Garrett**

<Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven, forty-six, forty-fi—>

There wasn’t any transition. One moment, MARCO’S voice was in my head, counting down as RACHEL absorbed us into her morph. The next moment, there was nothing.

No sound.

No light.

No sensation of any kind.

<Garrett,> I thought. I said my name first so that everybody could tell it was me—that was the rule, except when we were all sounding off. <Is anybody there? Over.>

Silence.

Not just silence as in very-quiet, but silence as in there-is-no-such-thing-as-sounds-or-ears-or-a-universe-and-you-are-alone. I once read a book that talked about a thing called PROPRIOCEPTION which is your body’s sense of where-it-is, things like how far your finger is away from your nose or whether or not your eyes are open and flies don’t have very good PROPRIOCEPTION but even so I could tell the difference between _dark-quiet_ and _nothing_ and this was _nothing._

I had no body at all.

Except that wasn’t quite right, because I was still thinking and thinking has to happen on _something,_ there has to be _some_ kind of thing that is doing the thinking, so maybe it was better to say that I had no _sense_ of having a body, which could mean that I didn’t have a body or that I had suffered some kind of paralyzing injury that had severed my nerve connections or that the morphing technology had malfunctioned or that I had just gone crazy and I was imagining things, but whether it was one of those or something else altogether I was still definitely ME.

Which actually probably meant that it wasn’t some kind of injury or craziness, because odds were that most things that would injure me that badly or make me that crazy would do something pretty drastic to my brain, too, and as far as I could tell my brain seemed to be working just fine. To test it, I decided to find the square root of 43716299, which was less than 49000000 and more than 36000000 which meant that the answer was between 6000 and 7000 and also 6500 squared was 42250000 and 6750 squared was 45562500 and after a few more seconds I had zigzagged all the way to 6611.8302 and then that was really really close so I stopped.

Then I decided to check my VERBAL CENTER so I took the word _area_ and tried to turn it into _chin_ by changing one letter at a time—

_—aria—_

_—arid—_

_—grid—_

_—grit—_

_—gait—_

_—wait—_

_—wail—_

_—tail—_

_—toil—_

_—coil—_

_—coin—_

_—chin—_

—and that was easy too so I decided that either my brain was working just fine or it was too broken to tell that it was broken and in any case it wasn’t going to do any good to worry about it, so I stopped.

For a second, I wasn’t thinking any thoughts at all, and the nothing started to remind me of the time TOBIAS and I went down into THE DARK to find THE GIANT SQUID, and I started to get scared, so I reminded myself that I was NOT AFRAID because I was THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO DOES THE RIGHT THING EVEN IF IT’S HARD, and that helped.

 _Okay,_ I thought to myself. _Think it through._

I had been sitting on RACHEL’S hand in a fly body, next to AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, and MARCO had been counting down while RACHEL morphed into MISTER TIDWELL so that she could get ILLIM to infest her to sneak us into THE POOL, and we’d been about halfway through the morph when everything went away—

And just like that, I had the answer, or at least a very good HYPOTHESIS, which was that when my fly body got sent off into Z-SPACE along with the rest of RACHEL, of course all of its senses got put on pause. But the fly body wasn’t where my brain was, it was just the input-output channel and my brain was somewhere else—in fact, my brain was on pause in its own little pocket dimension and my thoughts were probably running on some kind of ANDALITE EMULATOR TECHNOLOGY, and of course _that_ hadn’t gone into stasis because why would it?

But without the fly body, it didn’t have any sort of connection with the real universe, and so I was stuck in some kind of interdimensional limbo, which wasn’t great but I guess it wasn’t the worst thing, as long as the signal came back when RACHEL came out of morph.

I wondered if AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL would figure out the same HYPOTHESIS, or if he’d come up with something totally different, or if he’d already known this was going to happen and hadn’t said anything, or if he would just get scared or angry or go crazy. We had staged the scene with ILLIM three miles away from THE POOL, and MISTER TIDWELL had said that he could run three miles in twenty-three minutes because he was a VETERAN, so assuming that it took RACHEL the normal amount of time to morph and demorph and that it would take no more than five minutes to convince ILLIM to go along with the plan and that it would take no more than ten minutes to convince the YEERKS to let us through, then we would only be cut off for forty minutes, which was probably not enough time to really lose it, sanity-wise.

But that was a lot of assumptions, and also there’s a rule called MURPHY’S LAW which says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and certainly none of us had anticipated _this_ situation. MURPHY’S LAW is sort of a LIE, but it’s an interesting one because the more you believe it the less true it is and vice versa, so I believe it very hard most of the time, and so does TOBIAS and from what I can tell so does MARCO and maybe VISSER THREE.

I wondered for a minute if I was able to demorph, but I decided not to test it, partly because then I would be pouring a lot of mass into RACHEL’S pocket dimension—which would change her time limit, not to mention screwing up THE PLAN—and also partly because at the moment my mind was working, but if I demorphed I would be demorphing into a place where everything was in stasis, and since morphing takes concentration then at some point my mind would freeze and I wouldn’t be able to finish anyway.

In the end, there was nothing to do but settle in and wait. There was maybe a chance that the signal wouldn’t reconnect when RACHEL demorphed, and that this was where I would be stuck forever, but MISTER TIDWELL had been fine when MARCO morphed him away and anyway there wasn’t anything I could do about that, so instead I thought about TOBIAS and his mission to WASHINGTON, D.C. and whether or not it had been a good idea for him to go by himself and whether or not it was going well and whether or not he missed me.

Then I counted to ten thousand, which is something I’d always wanted to do, but every other time I’d tried it somebody had interrupted me or I’d fallen asleep.

Then I reviewed THE PLAN in my head.

I was halfway through trying to remember all of the first chapter of _Ender’s Shadow_  when all of a sudden the universe came back—temperature, pressure, humidity, light, background noise. Just like before, the change happened all at once, with no warning and no sense of transition.

<Garrett. Hello?> I asked, keeping my thought-speak on a narrow, private band. <Did we make it? Over.>

I’m not at all sure how thought-speak knows where to go. I asked TOBIAS and AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL what they’re doing in their heads when they send out private thought-speak, and they gave very different answers that weren’t at all like what I do. TOBIAS said that he just focuses really hard on a sort of _wanting,_ like how he _wants_ JAKE or RACHEL or MARCO to be able to hear him. AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL said that with other ANDALITES he can sort of feel who’s nearby and reach out to them directly, like holding hands, but that HUMANS feel like rocks in his head and so he just sends messages like throwing darts, only sometimes the darts hurt the rocks and he’s had to practice to make his darts softer.

I don’t do either of those things. Instead, I have a little picture that represents the person I want to talk to, and I hold up the words beside the picture and that seems to work. My picture of RACHEL is long and gold and sharp, and my picture of AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL is low and blue and furry and wiggly and lonely, and I held both of those up and also I held up my empty picture of NO ONE ELSE just to be sure.

<Rachel, are we in? Over.>

That was AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, who had forgotten the rule that we’re supposed to identify ourselves when we thought-speak except when it’s everybody sounding off, but I could tell it was him anyway because every word was clear-cut and very, very separate from the others.

<Yes,> said RACHEL, who usually thought with words that got very loud around the second letter before trailing off kind of quietly, like when people say _bUllshit_ or _mAke me._ <We’re in.>

I had already taken off by the time she finished think-speaking. I needed to move quickly—I was holding all of the sodium that MARCO and AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL had been able to carry together, which was almost three hundred pounds which meant that me plus the sodium weighed three hundred seventy-five pounds plus or minus five pounds which was only a little bit lighter than ELFANGOR-SIRINIAL-SHAMTUL’S body which meant that my morph time was only a little over an hour which meant that if all of my assumptions about timing were right then I had at most twenty minutes left in morph. ~~~~

My job was to find one of the piers that stretched out over the Yeerk pool and get underneath it and count to fifty to give AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL a head-start on finding the shield generator and then I was supposed to scream very loud for two seconds and then pause for two seconds and then scream again very loud for as long as I could but this time without including RACHEL or AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL and while I was screaming I was supposed to drop down into the pool and demorph where none of the CONTROLLERS could see me. I had taken thirty-six very deep breaths before I started my morph and I had filled my lungs all the way up right before they disappeared so I was pretty sure I could do the whole morph underwater but again MURPHY’S LAW.

It was very important that I only wait fifty seconds instead of just waiting however long it took AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL to find the shield generator, because he might not be able to find it at all and meanwhile RACHEL was going to be the center of a lot of attention and the sooner I started my distraction the better. She was supposed to be right next to the pool and so far she hadn’t said anything about _not_ being right next to the pool, so our plan where my first scream would draw the CONTROLLERS’ attention away from her and then my second scream would keep them distracted long enough for her to drop into the water was probably still a good one.

<I believe I am on the ceiling,> said AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, still forgetting the rule about identifying himself. <I am attempting to reorient. It is very difficult to sense my surroundings in this body. Over.>

<Stay high as much as you can,> reminded RACHEL, who also wasn’t following the rule. I wondered for a moment whether maybe I shouldn’t follow it either and whether it was like the rule about no talking after lights out which was a LIE and just for show, or whether it was like the rule about doing exercise so you don’t have a heart attack and die which people really believe but aren’t very good at following for some reason. <They’ve set up this place to be completely bug-proof. If they see a fly, they’ll go nuts. Over.>

The reminder wasn’t aimed at me, but it made sense and I’d sort of forgotten, so I aimed myself upward until the air around me was only vibrating, not really _moving_ the way it did around HEADS and HANDS and people walking and breathing. The fly brain liked it when the air was still and quiet because it meant _less danger_ , and I liked it because up there the smells weren’t complicated and swirling around and so it was much easier to find the wet swampy smell that meant FOOD to the fly brain and TARGET to me.

It was a lot harder than usual to keep track of where I was and where I’d been in the fly body, which could go up and down and sideways and backwards and couldn’t exactly see all that well, but it wasn’t _that_ much harder than it had been down in THE DARK after TOBIAS and I had fought THE GIANT SQUID. I’d forgotten to ask where exactly the piers were supposed to be, but I knew there were two of them and I didn’t want to distract RACHEL because she was in a compromised position, so once I got out over the water where the CONTROLLERS couldn’t see me I dropped down close to the surface and zigzagged back and forth until I found the edges of the pool and then used that to navigate to the center and then started to fly diagonally toward the corner on the side that seemed like it maybe had the most sounds and smells coming from it. I figured that the piers were probably sticking out of the longer side of the rectangle and were probably long enough that a diagonal path would take me right to them, but if I was wrong then once I got to the corner I could travel along the short side and that should work too.

<I could not find the entrance to the control room using this body’s senses,> said AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, still forgetting the rule about identifying himself. <But I believe I have found a suitable place to demorph. Garrett, I will wait until your signal, in case there is surveillance. Over.>

I wanted to answer but I didn’t have anything meaningful to add, so I just said <Roger> which is an answer that doesn’t need you to identify yourself or say _over_ because you only ever use it when there’s COMMON KNOWLEDGE about who’s talking to who and when you don’t want to say anything else anyway, although even with those rules it would get confusing pretty fast if we ever decided to go back to OAK LANDING and recruit ROGER CARSON who is two years older than me and owes TOBIAS a DOLLAR.

The vibrations and air currents were getting stronger in front of me, and I thought I could detect a soft, regular pounding like footsteps even though I was still only two-thirds of the way to the corner and out over the water, so I made a hypothesis that I was almost at the pier which was sort-of proved when my crazy fly eyes started picking up a kind of gray blur above and in front of me and definitely proved when SOMETHING BIG fell past me and splashed into the water. It was a good thing the fly body was so good at dodging because the thing that fell into the water, which I guess was a YEERK, was maybe ten thousand times heavier than me and any one of the droplets which flew up into the air could have knocked me out of the sky. That wouldn’t have been too bad, I guess, since I was going to have to get into the water soon anyway, but I wanted to be under the pier when I did it so that there was less of a chance of one of the CONTROLLERS shooting me while I demorphed.

<Garrett,> I thought, holding up my pictures of RACHEL and AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL. <I’m at the pier, over.>

Swooping into the slightly-darker-and-quieter space between the metal and the water, I latched onto something hard and let my wings rest, unable to stop the fly body from spitting and rubbing its hands together. I was going to start counting to fifty, but then I decided that didn’t make sense anymore since AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL didn’t need extra time and RACHEL was still in danger. I checked in with them both, and then braced myself, holding up a picture of a sphere three hundred meters across whose volume of one hundred thirteen million, ninety-seven thousand, three hundred thirty-five point five three cubic meters was completely filled up so that the thought-speak would know to go to EVERYBODY.

< _EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, >_ I broadcast, for as close to two seconds as I could manage.

When TOBIAS and I were down in THE DARK with THE GIANT SQUID, I had sort-of-accidentally-on-purpose discovered that we could use thought-speak as a weapon, like how parents who lift cars off of their children really are trying to lift cars off of their children but probably aren’t expecting it to actually work. All of the others had tried it, too, but only AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL was able to do it, and even he couldn’t do it half as well as I could or for as long as I could.

TOBIAS said it was a superpower, like JAKE understanding people or CASSIE being the best morpher, and he held up his hand with the scar that means we are TRUE FRIENDS. But he was wrong because the screaming isn’t a superpower any more than being good with numbers or having a mental map or being able to hear the difference between other people’s thought-speak is a superpower. I maybe have a superpower but it’s just one superpower, not four of them, and it’s not particularly interesting or special because it’s just that when I’m doing something hard I use all of my head to do it instead of getting lazy or distracted the way most people do.

I held up my sphere-picture again, this time with two small holes in it shaped like RACHEL and AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL.

< _EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE— >_

I kept on thought-screaming as I demorphed, right up until the moment that I felt the little hiccup that was the morphing tech handing my mind back over to my real brain, which was usually more or less halfway. I was getting pretty big at that point, but I was pretty sure that none of the CONTROLLERS would have seen me yet, because all of them would have been pretty incapacitated by forty-five seconds of brain-not-working. For a second, I wondered if it had been a mistake to do my thought-scream to EVERYBODY, since that would include all of the CONTROLLERS in the building and a lot of the ones on the street and maybe even all of the ones down underground doing the digging which meant it would be pretty obvious where the scream was coming from, if you were outside and paying attention, and at the center was ME and I didn’t particularly want to get shot. But then I remembered the shield and decided that it wasn’t very likely even given that the YEERKS were probably actually paying very very close attention.

<All activity within the building seems to have stopped,> said AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, still forgetting the rule about identifying himself. <Many of the Controllers I can see are unconscious, and the rest are visibly incapacitated.> There was a long pause, almost long enough that I thought he’d forgotten to say _over_ , too, but then he continued. <It appears that we drastically underestimated the offensive power of thought-speak against species that do not have the _eib_. This is an area worth exploring, in the future. Over. >

I didn’t respond, because by that point I was almost fully human, the foam-wrapped chunks of sodium popping out of my skin and falling off like some sort of time-lapse video of apples ripening on a tree. RACHEL had thought that there might be some danger of the sodium reacting with the water mid-morph, but MARCO pointed out that none of us had started bleeding during the morphing process which meant that there was probably already some kind of CONTAINMENT FIELD keeping everything sane.

Along with the sodium came the earplugs, headphones, and helmet that I’d worn as protection against the YEERKS, and the Dracon beam I’d brought with me as protection against the CONTROLLERS. But as my eyes finally un-segmented and the world came back into focus, I saw that even the pool had gone quiet, the surface still and unbroken except by the ripples coming from me and from RACHEL.

RACHEL was clinging to the edge of the pool, her own Dracon beam out and firing at low power, pouring stun bolts into every CONTROLLER she could see. “Bombs away?” she called between blasts, her voice carrying easily across the distance between us but still hard to hear because all of the things I had protecting my ears.

“Yeah,” I answered, pulling off the helmet and headphones and dropping them into the water. “Clock’s ticking. Are we still morphing in the water?”

According to MISTER TIDWELL, the foam canisters he’d assembled around the chunks of sodium should last for at least two and a half minutes, which had felt like the right balance between slow-enough-to-not-kill-us and fast-enough-that-the-YEERKS-couldn’t-do-anything-about-it, especially since there were dozens of them. That also meant that Rachel and I had somewhere between one hundred and maybe one hundred thirty seconds before the first of them started to explode, which meant that we had somewhere between ten and forty seconds to start morphing if we wanted to finish morphing before any of the explosions happened, assuming MURPHY’S LAW didn’t have anything to do with it.

In the original version of the plan, we’d thought that the room might very well be full of CONTROLLERS who were shooting at us and also we’d thought that even with all of that sodium, probably not _all_ of the water was going to explode or burn away and water is a very good insulator so even though the odds weren’t great we’d planned on doing our second morph without getting out of the pool. This had been what MARCO called a BAD PLAN but I was NOT AFRAID because I am THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO DOES THE RIGHT THING EVEN IF IT’S HARD and right now the right thing was to DESTROY THE YEERK POOL and if that meant dying then I was not happy to die but at least I was okay with it and TOBIAS would be proud of me.

“How hot did Cassie say they could stand?” she asked, as I dug the earplugs out of my ears and dropped them into the water as well.

“One hundred fifty degrees C,” I called back. I reached up for the edge of the pier, making sure that I could haul myself out if I had to. If RACHEL didn’t make a decision within the next ten seconds, I decided, I would make a decision for myself, and the decision would be not to be right next to all of the things that were about to explode but instead maybe to be outside of the building entirely or wherever AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL was. “The explosions can get as hot as eleven hundred C,” I added, trying to be helpful.

Fortunately RACHEL is not the type of person who wastes a lot of time when she makes decisions, and there were over two seconds left out of the original ten when she said “Out” and hauled herself out of the water, still firing stun bursts left and right even though by this point she’d pretty much shot everybody who hadn’t already been unconscious which according to AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL wasn’t many.

I climbed up onto the pier and ran back toward the shore, stepping over two HORK-BAJIR who had fallen over but not fallen all the way into the water. For a moment I thought that RACHEL might be heading for one of the doors, but then I saw that she was simply heading for the corner of the room that was furthest away from the pool and partially protected by a storage shed, which was good because one of the doors led down to where JAKE got eaten which was DANGEROUS and one of the doors led outside but was welded shut and one of the doors led back up to the rest of the building but it had a BIO-FILTER on it and the other two doors led to UNCHARTED TERRITORY. It was going to get to eleven hundred C right by the water but with that much distance we would maybe be safe, especially if the ventilation system wasn’t very good and the fire ate up all the oxygen before things got too hot.

As near as I could tell, we were already over a minute and a half past the moment when the first sodium canister had dropped off me by the time we actually started our second morph. And sure enough, we were only a third of the way through when we heard a FTHP and a HSSS and then a very loud BOOM followed by a series of CRACKLES and then several more BOOMS until soon enough the whole thing was just one ongoing VERY LOUD NOISE and there was light that was so bright that I had to squeeze my eyes shut even behind the storage shed and keep them shut until they morphed away along with my ears and by that point I couldn’t really sense anything except the feeling of falling in slow motion as my body grew smaller and smaller and smaller into the smallest shape I’d been yet.

CASSIE loves animals and knows a lot about them compared to the rest of us, which is why we go to her when we need to do something that is particularly tricky for humans, and even if she doesn’t always know _how_ to get the right animal she almost always knows _which_ animal we want. In this case, what we wanted was an animal that was small enough to avoid notice and tough enough that it wouldn’t mind if it got a little crushed and also as fireproof as possible to whatever extent _fireproof_ was a thing-an-animal-might-be. And we’d thought that maybe there weren’t any animals like that and this was just going to be a suicide mission, but then CASSIE had said that she knew just the thing and not only that but we could also probably find it right there in the valley if we were willing to spend a few hours looking very closely at different patches of moss.

And so we still had problems, we definitely had problems, we were going to have a very hard time escaping if the building collapsed on us but at least we would probably make it through the initial fireball because TARDIGRADES are some of the toughest creatures on the planet or as MARCO says they absolutely just do not give a FUCK.


	21. Chapter 18: Cassie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: I pushed to get this one out *almost* on time, but I'm still in recovery and can't promise that the next update will be in exactly two weeks. I CAN promise that I'm thinking about it, and working on it, and that I don't plan on a long hiatus until the end of this cycle. But I hope you can bear with me in the meantime.
> 
> Oh, and I hope you'll leave some reviews, or head over to r/rational and leave some comments. Your thoughts keep me going, and for this chapter in particular I'm curious what my readers have to say. In many ways, Cassie is the most interesting and difficult character for me to write, and I'm always nervous about whether or not I did her justice.

 

**Chapter 18: Cassie**

I could see the exact moment when everyone stopped pretending.

<Holy shit,> whispered Marco, as the ten or so people closest to the YMCA staggered to a halt, clutching their heads or screaming or just falling over twitching. There was one car on the road within the bubble, and it swerved crazily, careening into the steep, narrow ditch and belching black smoke. A second car passed right through, drifting ominously to one side before straightening out, screeching to a halt a hundred yards down the road. In the parking lot, a truck that was just pulling out of its space lurched forward and smashed into a post, its airbags expanding to hide the driver from view.

We were silent, the three of us, except for Marco’s one whispered curse. Silent, as a pair of pedestrians rushed forward to help those who’d already collapsed, only to stumble and fall themselves as they passed into the affected area. Silent, as a teenager pulled his phone out of his pocket and held it up as if to take a video, and silent as an elderly woman hobbled up from behind him and clubbed him with her cane, her expression hunted and desperate. Silent, as a siren began to wail in the distance, followed quickly by another, and another, and another, until it seemed like the whole city was screaming.

What was there to say?

We knew what we were doing.

Above me, Jake wheeled and dove, his peregrine falcon body slicing through the air like a missile, with Marco’s osprey close on his tail. I folded my wings and followed them both, angling toward the treetops on the far side of the park—close enough to see, with bird-of-prey vision, but far enough away that the Bug fighters hopefully wouldn’t bother trying to gun us down.

We waited for an endless minute, watching from afar as the Yeerk hologram continued to loop, showing the same laughs, the same splashes, the same set of people walking and swimming and diving and chatting. I wondered whether they’d recorded normal humans, or whether the whole thing had been a charade, a nightmare puppet show of slaves forced to act happy and carefree. I tried to summon anger, indignation, fury.

But all I felt was sick.

<Look,> said a voice. Jake. Marco. It didn’t seem to matter.

I was already looking. There were streams of jet-black smoke coming off of the building, appearing out of thin air as they cleared the holograms a few feet above the roof. Down below, a chubby boy stepped out onto the diving board—leapt out into space—flailed—landed on his belly with a _smack_ I imagined I could hear even half a mile away. I watched the water from the splash sparkle in midair, the artificial droplets catching artificial light as reality burned invisibly behind them.

<They did it,> said a voice.

It might have been the same voice. I couldn’t tell.

The streams of smoke were growing thicker, braiding together into a single column that billowed and rose, drifting lazily in the morning breeze. A fire truck screeched into view, rocking to a halt beside the hydrant, disgorging half a dozen Controllers dressed in bright yellow gear. There were two more engines already in sight, along with four ambulances and more police cars than I could count.

Eventually, the holograms around the windows began to fail—first one, then another—bits and pieces of the underlying truth showing through until finally the entire scene was laid bare. That’s when they turned on the hoses—figuring, I guess, that if the holograms were down, the shield might be, too. But no—the water simply spread out in midair, streaming down the invisible surface of the stolen Andalite force field. A handful of EMTs were clustered around each of the Controllers who’d collapsed from Garrett’s thought-scream, and as far as I could see, none of them had gotten back up yet.

There was frustration written on every face—helplessness, despair, rage, shock. Slowly, the Controllers gathered—first a few, then dozens, more of them streaming in from all sides, coming in cars or on bikes or on foot. We watched as some of them ran past beneath us, not bothering to look up, their eyes fixed on the ultimate horror, the unthinkable disaster.

And then—

They could have noticed. They _should_ have noticed—would almost certainly have put two and two together, if it hadn’t been for the water. One moment it was a fountain, flowing down the sides of the bubble, and the next it was mist, the streams falling directly onto the building as the barrier disappeared. With a wordless cry, the crowd rushed forward, firefighters and police and EMTs and random people off of the street, all of them moved by courage or loyalty or heroism or whatever the Yeerk equivalent was—all of them trying to help.

None of them saw that the smoke had stopped rising. That it was flattening, darkening, the space above the rooftop becoming more and more defined as soot and ash piled up with nowhere to go.

Ax had inverted the shield.

<Okay. Let’s gear up,> said the voice. Half-nauseated, half-numb, I dropped toward the ground like a stone, plummeting into the brush at the base of the tree, shielded from view. Holding my wings out for balance, I focused on my human form, and began to demorph.

 _Cassie,_ I thought to myself.

It almost felt like becoming a different person—like morphing, instead of demorphing, like I’d changed so much that my own body no longer fit, no longer seemed familiar. I didn’t know whether the old me was a lie or the new me was a mistake or the whole thing was just layers with nothing at the core. Somewhere deep beneath the surface, I still cared about people, about right and wrong—or at least, I _believed_ that I cared—or at least, I _believed_ I believed, or believed I _should_ believe—

_Stop pretending, girl._

I’d never been very good at lying to myself. At ignoring my own thoughts, at shutting out the parts of me that were judgmental—cowardly—selfish—sarcastic—vengeful—petty—cruel. That’s why I’d always leaned so hard on my morals, my upbringing, my code.

You see, it doesn’t _matter_ if you’re a bad person on the inside, as long as you don’t _do_ anything about it. A bad person who acts good her entire life _is_ a good person.

Only now, it wasn’t so easy. I couldn’t just ask my teachers what to do, when my friends started plotting mass murders and war crimes. There weren’t any relevant lessons from Buddha or Jesus or Mister Rogers. There was no Chicken Soup for the Guerilla Soul. And my parents—

I flinched.

We never talked about it—about what had happened to us, about our parents and Jake’s brother Tom and Rachel’s little sisters, Jordan and Sara. You’d think it would’ve come up, in the time we’d spent up in the valley—that on one of those long, cold nights, we would have acknowledged it, tried to support one another through the fear and loss and pain. That maybe we would have cried, or told stories, or made rescue plans. _Something,_ you know? Anything.

But we hadn’t. Not one word, as far as I could tell—not from anyone. Just like we hadn’t talked about Jake’s weird resurrection, or about Rachel murdering a kid to get to Visser Three. It was like we were all pretending it wasn’t happening—like if we didn’t think about it, it would somehow not be real. Like little kids, trying to act grown up, blustering about how we don’t _need_ to look under the bed, there’s _nothing there,_ don’t be stupid. Afraid that if we let the cracks show, we’d fall apart, and then there would be no hope left at all.

At least, that’s what _I_ was afraid of. I had taken the weight of the world on my shoulders—we all had—and there was no one to tell me whether the deaths of twenty thousand Yeerks should make that burden lighter, or heavier.

<They’re still going inside,> breathed one of the boys.

<What?> said the other. < _Why? >_

<Dunno. But look—there’s, like, not even twenty people still standing aro—>

The voices cut off as their owners passed out of morph. I was halfway through myself, the feathers on my chest melting and running together as I grew upward, the prickly leaves of the bushes scratching my back as my palms and knees emerged and pressed into the loamy mulch. The waxy substance covering my body darkened, the whites and grays shading into brown striped with black and green. The green thickened and became clothes, while the black ballooned outward, swelling into cold steel and dense rubber and materials of unknown and alien origin. An arsenal emerged from my body, laser guns and shock sticks and some kind of pellet launcher whose ammunition contained—according to Ax—one ten millionth of a gram of antimatter each.

One by one, the objects fell away from me, thudding heavily onto the ground or clattering loudly against each other. A hundred pounds of gear—enough to shrink my time limit down to a mere eighty-one minutes.

 _There’s no way to make this mission safe,_ Marco had said. _Prime target or no prime target, we can’t, absolutely_ can not _put the whole team in danger._

Taking in a deep breath, I refocused—on skin the color of evergreens, porous and cracked like pumice. On a dozen blades of dull ivory, each as long and as lethal as Ax’s tail blade. On horns like a rhinoceros, claws like a dragon, a spiked tail like a Stegosaurus’s. On thick, muscled arms and wide, flat teeth; on legs that bowed inward, with dewclaws that came all the way down to dig into the ground behind their heels.

 _We’re not just sending them in with no support,_ Jake had insisted. _We can cover their retreat, at least—even from the sidelines._

I’d had my suspicions about the Hork-Bajir, suspicions which Elfangor’s memories and Ax’s half-remembered academy lessons had confirmed. They were arboreal, herbivorous, perfectly adapted for a life of climbing and grazing in the gigantic trees of their low-gravity homeworld. They’d barely evolved to the level of tribal civilization, with a language of fewer than a thousand words. They’d known absolutely nothing of violence or war, despite their fearsome appearance—their world had no large predators, and the blades were for digging into bark, cutting through branches, and slicing off leaves. It was the Yeerks who’d turned those blades to mutilation and murder, conscripting them into their armies, converting them into shock troops.

The morph mostly complete, I stood, my thick skin and whipcord muscles easily shrugging aside the thorns and brambles. Wielding my wrist blades like twin machetes, I carved out a circular space around myself, tossing the detritus aside as Jake and Marco rose nearby.

_Nobody’s going to mess with a trio of Hork-Bajir in the middle of all the chaos, especially not if they’re all geared up and clearly not causing any problems. We settle in, make like Controllers, and stay out of trouble for as long as we can. If they manage to get out on their own, nobody will ever even know we were there._

Marco hadn’t liked it. They’d come close to shouting over it, and Jake’s alternative—that he was perfectly welcome to stay behind himself, if he was so worried about maintaining a reserve—hadn’t helped. In the end, Marco had agreed to come along simply because—he’d muttered—none of the rest of us were competent to strategize on the fly when the whole thing inevitably fell apart.

_We do nothing. Nothing, you understand? Not one god damned thing. Not until they’re clear of the building—not unless our own lives are at stake._

Jake had nodded. And so Rachel, Garrett, and Ax had gone inside—the footsoldiers, the expendables, the ones who could stand their ground in the face of horror and death. And Jake and Marco had stayed outside—the plotters, the manipulators, the masterminds. The ones who—along with Tobias—would form the nucleus of a new resistance, if everything went wrong.

And then there was me. Too soft for combat and too stupid for strategy—an in-the-way sort-of pacifist who had neither the courage to stand up for her principles nor the integrity to admit she’d abandoned them. For what felt like the hundredth time, my job was to do nothing, absolutely nothing—just wait, and watch, and try to find a middle ground between relief and shame.

It wasn’t the violence—not exactly. I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t an idiot, either. I could do the math. I knew that if you could sacrifice one life to save ten, or a hundred to save a thousand, or a million to save a billion—

I knew the Yeerk pool had to go.

But there’s _more to it_ than math. A thousand lives lost plus two thousand lives saved just _isn’t the same thing_ as a thousand lives saved, period. Jake and Marco could add and subtract and walk away feeling—

Not happy, I guess. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen either of them truly happy. But satisfied. Confident. _Guilt-free._ They were sure of themselves, sure in their decisions, able to sleep at night because they knew they’d found the—what was the phrase Marco had used?

_Most efficient intervention._

As if that was it—that was that. As if the fact that _as few people as possible_ had died meant there was no reason to grieve over the loss. As if the only deaths that were tragic were the _unnecessary_ ones.

I wanted to stop it. I wanted to _do_ something. But every action I could think of was empty and meaningless—symbolic gestures that would end up costing more lives, in the end. There was nothing I could do to make it better, nothing that Jake and Marco hadn’t already thought of.

_Girl, I thought you weren’t going to lie to yourself._

I winced again, the reptilian double-lids of my alien eyes snicking shut.

So far, I had managed to avoid the fighting. Avoid the killing, except for the bear I had slaughtered—the bear I could conveniently blame on temporary insanity, even though I knew it hadn’t been. I had bowed out of every plan that called for lethal force, and managed to make a few possibly lethal ones less likely to cross the line, like when I insisted on using the tarantula hawk morph during Rachel’s midnight Controller-acquiring mission, instead of letting Ax’s sniper rifle be the primary backup the way Marco wanted.

But it was clear that seven full soldiers would be better than six and a half. That we could do more, move faster, make more progress, if I wasn’t holding everybody back. I’d been keeping my hands clean, but at a cost. A cost that could probably be measured in lives, if I weren’t such a coward—if I were willing to force myself to look straight at it.

Marco had only brought me along on this mission because he wanted the extra weapons I could carry. Now that I’d delivered them, I could morph into a bird, or just walk away, and neither he nor Jake would lift a finger to stop me. I was a liability, after all—unwilling to pull my weight, a nagging conscience for a group that didn’t want or need one.

But leaving wouldn’t solve my central problem. It’d just be swapping out one moral defect for another. I didn’t want any more killing, and I didn’t want the Yeerks to win—no matter what, I was going to end up compromising on _something._

<Heads up.>

I turned to look just in time, the four-pointed stars of my pupils narrowing at the sudden flash of light. Above the black bubble, plasma-purple beams were emerging out of thin air, crisscrossing as they lanced down into the hidden building below.

<What—>

There was a _crack_ like a lightning bolt _,_ frighteningly loud even all the way across the park, and suddenly the edges of the dome softened, the smoke rising and expanding as the shield abruptly vanished.

<The Bug fighters,> someone said, grim and desperate. <They took out the shield generator. They knew it was right in the exact center of the field.>

<But— _Ax_ —>

<Yeah. Ax.>

As the horror sank in, a scattering of figures came into view, an expanding ring of bodies that must have been pressed up against the inverted shield. They staggered unevenly forward, most falling before they made it ten steps. There were humans, and Hork-Bajir, and some kind of orange eight-legged spider thing with an upright body like a giant bacteriophage. The few Controllers who’d remained outside rushed forward to help as the firefighters began targeting the streams of water, no longer blinded by trapped smoke.

<Not many,> said a brittle voice. <Maybe—what—a hundred?>

Maybe not even that many—as the first wave slowed and stopped, no second wave followed. The doors and windows of the building gaped open, half of them rimmed with fire, and only a trickle of Controllers emerged from within.

<That was over three minutes of smoke buildup, plus greenhouse effects. I’d be surprised if _anybody_ on the higher floors is alive. >

The two boys continued talking in my head, their words hollow and meaningless. A part of me wanted to scream at them, to point out that Ax might have just _died_ and that we should _care_ about that, that we should grieve for him or at least _talk_ about it for more than two seconds. But the rest of me wouldn’t allow it—wouldn’t condone grief for the Andalite warrior when his death was just a drop in the bucket. We’d estimated that there were at least ten thousand human Controllers by this point—over five percent of the city population—plus however many alien hosts the Yeerks had living and working in their command center. Over three thousand Controllers coming in and out every day—over three hundred humans inside, at any given time.

Plus the aliens.

Plus the people who’d showed up and rushed in—many, many more than those who’d staggered out.

No, if Ax was dead—if Ax _and_ Rachel _and_ Garrett were all dead—if Jake and Marco and I died _with_ them—it would be nothing more than a blip, a trifle, a small change to a single digit. We’d taken out somewhere between ten and twenty thousand Yeerks, and we’d knowingly sacrificed at least five hundred innocents to do it.

Or the rest of them had, anyway. I’d been on the sidelines, pretending it wasn’t my fault.

Not for the first time, I wished my parents were there—mine, or Jake’s, or even Rachel’s or Marco’s. Not just because of how badly I missed them, or how frightened or lonely I was, or because I still had nightmares every night about those last few minutes with my mom in the car.

No, just so that there would be somebody to take the responsibility off of my shoulders—to tell me what to do, make the hard choices for me, take the blame. To tell me that everything was going to be all right.

But they weren’t, and it wasn’t. This was only the beginning.

<You start the clock?> one of them said.

<Yeah,> the other answered. <Fifty-four minutes left, assuming we’re still giving them the full hour—>

And then everything stopped.

 

*        *        *

 

“Do you think we should we move?”

“How the hell should _I_ know? You two have just as much experience with this shit as I do.”

Reaching up to a dangling branch, Marco seized a leaf and tugged. It came off in his hand—his _human_ hand—the branch bobbing gently, the other leaves rustling softly for a moment before falling still once more. Holding up the leaf, he tore it in half, then in half again, then held the pieces up in his palm and blew them away with a breath. They fluttered silently down to the ground, where he kicked at them, scattering mulch in the process.

“Gravity still works. We can hear each other, so sound waves are still propagating. Also, we’re not frozen to death like we should be if the air around us had completely stopped moving, and we’re not suffocating like we should be if the air around us had completely stopped moving, and we’re not trapped in place _like we should be if the air around us had completely stopped moving.”_

I looked up at the branch Marco had grabbed. It was perfectly still, but I couldn’t tell whether it was any stiller than normal.

All around us, as far as we could see, time had stopped. The trees were frozen in place, the clouds in the sky like paintings on a domed ceiling, the smoke from the burning building a thick, black, still-life smear. There was no sound except the three of us, a silence as deep and unnerving as being in an underground tomb.

“That, plus we can see, so photons are still moving, which either means that time _hasn’t_ stopped as far as the Sun is concerned, or that all of this just makes _no fucking sense.”_

We were standing there in our clothes, having somehow been instantaneously returned to human form, the weapons teleporting themselves to the ground a few feet away.

“Cassie,” said Jake, his voice taut. “Can you morph?”

I closed my eyes, focusing on the memory of Elfangor—we could use his help, and this certainly seemed to qualify as _dire need_ —but nothing happened. To be sure, I tried again with Peppermint, the first morph I’d ever done, but still—nothing.

“No,” I answered. “Stuck.”

“Me, too.” He frowned and turned back to Marco. “This isn’t the Yeerks,” he said. “No way they have this level of technology, unless it’s some crazy thing Visser Three’s been developing on the side, and if it was, we’d already be dead. The Chee, maybe?”

“Don’t bet on it,” Marco muttered darkly. “My money’s on one of those two Big Bads that Elfangor wouldn’t tell us about. Crayak or Ellimist. Or both of them, who knows.”

He bent over to retrieve one of the laser rifles, pointed it at a nearby tree, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. With a wordless noise of disgust, Marco tossed it back onto the pile.

“I think we should move,” Jake said, sounding uncertain-and-trying-to-hide-it.

“Oh yeah?” Marco shot back. “Where?”

“Only one obvious place—”

“—yeah, of course, and it’s _exactly_ where we want to be, in human form, with _no weapons_ , when whatever the hell this is wears off.”

“If this was about killing us, we’d be dead already.”

“Doesn’t mean we make it easy for them, if they’ve got some kind of James Bond sadism planned.”

“Rachel and Garrett and Ax are in there.”

“And they’re either unfrozen like us, or they’re stuck. Either way, we don’t do them any good by getting ourselves killed.”

“Marco—”

“ _No,_ Jake. No, okay? Listen, I—”

He broke off, chewing at his lip, seeming to struggle with himself. I glanced over at the YMCA, at the motionless flames like carved glass. Part of the building had begun to collapse, the brick and rebar buckling in the heat, all three stories sagging like a tent held up with twigs. From the look of it, the pool itself was already half buried. I could see a lone Controller standing exactly on the line between us and the building, his back to us, his arms down at his sides. It was completely impossible to tell, from half a mile away, but for some reason I was sure his fists were clenched.

“Look,” Marco said finally, his expression settling into one of grim determination. “I broke into Elfangor’s head, okay?” He nodded toward Jake. “The night after you woke up. Dug through his memories, through all kinds of crazy shit. This war, it—it’s insane. Unless Elfangor was legitimately psychotic, there’ve been all kinds of impossible things happening. Like, time travel and prophecies and parallel universes level impossible.”

He broke off again as Jake and I stared, shaking his head. “I _know,_ okay? I know. But you can check for yourself, if whatever this is doesn’t end with all of us dying. But there’s one thing—it—I don’t even know what to _do_ with it—”

He broke off for a third time, and sighed. “Look. Remember the stuff Elfangor said, back before we even went into his ship? That thing about how we all had to get along, or all hope was lost?” He seemed to brace himself, his jaw muscles bunched and tight. “Elfangor got this—message, once. Like a burning bush kind of message. You ever see any of those time-reversed videos? Like eggs unscrambling and jumping back into their shells? The kind of stuff that’s only possible if physics is—well—”

He gestured helplessly at the unmoving trees. “Anyway, long story short, somebody _knew_ that he was going to meet us. _Us,_ in particular. They knew, and they told him. And not some vague fortune cookie bullshit like ‘you will find allies,’ but ‘you’re going to die, and before you die, you’re going to run into four human kids, and you’d better help them or everything is fucked.’”

Jake’s shoulders visibly tensed as I felt my heart try to climb into my throat. “Four?” he asked, his voice taut.

“Four,” Marco confirmed. “By name. Jake Berenson, Marco Levy, Tobias Yastek—”

He paused, his eyes flickering in my direction.

 _Of course, it’s obvious, you knew it all along, you really_ don’t _belong—_

“—and Cassie Withers. Rachel was never supposed to be there.”

_But—_

_I—_

Oh.

I made a connection in my head, felt my eyes narrow. “So that’s why you sent the three of them into the pool?” I asked pointedly. “Her and Ax and Garrett, instead of you and me and Jake? Because they’re—they’re _spares?”_

 _Awful lot of accusation in your voice for someone who called them “expendables” five minutes ago,_ a part of me thought.

“Yep,” Marco said, meeting my gaze head-on, his own eyes wide and unashamed. “Absolutely. You got a _better_ way to divvy things up, given that particular nugget of information?”

I opened my mouth, realized I didn’t know how to put my thoughts and feelings into words, and closed it again, a sick, twisting sensation growing in my stomach.

“What—” Jake began. He faltered and began to pace, scrubbing at his eyes with one hand, the crunch of his footsteps eerily loud in the utter silence of the frozen moment. “What else did the message say?”

Marco shrugged. “Nothing that Elfangor remembered in any kind of clear detail. This was like ten years ago, for him. But he definitely got the sense that the four of us were _absolutely crucial_ to the fight against the Yeerks. Like, cannot-possibly-win-without-us crucial.”

“According to some—prophecy?”

“According to the Andalite equivalent of Jesus appearing in a slice of toast, except that this Jesus also came along with the solution to some math problem they’ve been trying to crack for over fifty years. Elfangor’s not an idiot—he checked the thing backwards and forwards for tricks, hoaxes, pranks—interference of any kind. As far as they could tell, though, it was just a slice of toast. Metaphorically speaking, I mean. No force fields, no energy disruptions, no radiation, no sign of any kind of tampering. The heat just randomly happened to line up, just right, and voilà—a Nobel Prize-winning math proof and the names of four human kids.”

“That’s—”

“Bullshit? No duh. Nobody _actually_ bought that it was chance. Point is, though, if some rando says something and calls it a prophecy, that’s one thing. If somebody has enough control over, like, individual molecules to make their prophecy just _appear out of thin air—”_

They kept talking as I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to disentangle my emotions.

Marco was right, of course—absolutely right. If you bought that there was a prophecy and that prophecy said the four of us were somehow important, then you should _definitely_ send someone else on the suicide mission. We weren’t invincible, as Jake’s accident had already demonstrated.

But Marco was also wrong—wasn’t he? Wrong to put someone else in mortal danger, wrong to consider himself—and us—more worthy of saving, wrong to make the choice for everyone, manipulating the rest of us into it while keeping us in the dark. It tugged against my sense of ethics, set off alarm bells in my moral code.

Rachel shouldn’t die, so that I could live.

Neither should Garrett or Ax.

Right?

_Little late to start drawing a hard line, girl. You’ve been letting other people die for you for weeks, now. Or do you think it’s somehow different when it happens to be people you know and like, instead of strangers?_

That wasn’t what—

_Besides, it’s not like you would’ve done anything differently if you’d known. You’d have just sat there, wringing your hands, and in the end you would’ve gone along with whatever Jake and Marco—_

“Stop,” I said aloud, cutting off the thought. Jake broke off mid-sentence as he and Marco turned to look at me.

_Nothing, that’s what you’ll do, that’s what you’ve been doing this whole time—_

“I’m going into the building,” I said, the sick feeling in my stomach easing slightly. “You guys can come or not, if you want.”

“ _Did you not hear anything I just said?”_ Marco hissed. “We shouldn’t even be _here_ , let alone walking into the middle of a _literal firestorm._ If some godlike being wants to drag us into that shithole, they can just—”

 

*        *        *

 

“God _dammit!”_ Marco shouted, his voice ragged with frustration.

We had been plunged into shadow, the air around us thick and heavy with the smell of smoke and chemicals. As my eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, I saw that the floor beneath my feet was tile, covered in dust and soot.

Around us was a scene of motionless madness, the world’s most terrifying wax museum. There were bodies everywhere—some untouched, some burned, some still burning, the flames like crystals growing off of blackened flesh. A handful of figures were still standing, frozen in mid-step, mostly yellow-clad firefighters but also a few Hork-Bajir and a couple of humans in plain clothes. Chunks of brick and metal hung in the air, arrested mid-fall, and through the haze I could see a pair of bright, angled bars that had to be laser beams.

To my right, dim sunlight struggled to illuminate the smoke, streaming in through the partially collapsed outer wall. To my left, a curtain of fire licked across every square inch from floor to ceiling, outlining doors and windows like black caves, seeming to move even in the utter stillness. In front of me lay the cracked ruins of the Yeerk pool, drained and empty, clumps of glistening Yeerk-flesh still clinging to the walls and floor. The two piers were melted and broken, the far side an uneven, gaping hole, opening up onto some enormous underground cavern lit by an unearthly green light.

“Marco?” came a voice, and we all jumped.

“ _Tobias?”_ Marco called back. “What—where are you?”

“Over here—in the corner.”

There was a strained, strangled quality to his voice, like glass rubbing on glass. Slowly, we began to pick our way through the rubble, occasionally blinded by immobile clouds of soot, taking care to stay well back from the edges of the hole. At one point, we passed a man who had just stumbled over the lip, his eyes wide and terrified, his arms flailing.

“Should we—” I began, but I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. Even if we’d wanted to save him—even if we’d been _able_ to, if whatever lunatic rules were in place allowed us to pull him back—he was just one of what seemed like a hundred people on the brink of disaster. On the far side of the pool, there was a little boy clinging to the twisted bars of what had been one of the cages, his feet dangling over the abyss. Over by the wall of fire, there were two women trying to lift a third to her feet, unaware that a slab of ceiling had broken loose and was hovering twenty feet overhead. Through one of the doors that led deeper into the building, I could see an entire room full of flame, and a pair of aliens standing on the far side, looking out toward the open sky, despair and helplessness written in their body language in a way that transcended the need for translation.

 _You did this_ , whispered the quiet, merciless voice in my head. _Clean hands or no clean hands. You let this happen—_ made _this happen._

Feeling sick once more, I lowered my eyes to the ground, keeping them locked onto the heels of Marco’s sneakers as they stepped over melted lumps that might not have been bodies.

_That’s right—look away. If you can’t see it, it didn’t happen, right?_

The sneakers stopped, and I looked up, taking in the scene just as Marco let loose a low, defeated moan.

Tobias was standing in front of us, his face streaked with tears, his hands curled into fists. He was glaring daggers at Jake, whose own face had gone slack with horror.

Behind him, a trio of figures were frozen in mid-run—a grizzly bear with an Andalite thrown over its shoulder, both with half their fur burned away, and a shape midway between human and gorilla, its thick fingers clutching a Yeerk Dracon beam.

Rachel, Ax, and Garrett.

Behind _them_ was a hole in the wall, through which were climbing half a dozen Hork-Bajir and a pair of the strange orange spider things. Two of the Hork-Bajir were already through, had stopped and had raised their weapons, their fingers tight on the triggers. That was the source of the two bright laser beams I had spotted earlier, both discharges hanging halfway between the aliens and their targets. One was lined up with the back of Rachel’s knee, and the other—

The other was aimed directly at the base of Garrett’s neck.

“You said you would keep him safe,” Tobias said softly, his voice cracking. He took a step toward Jake, who continued to look past him, unable to tear his eyes away. “You _promised_ me you would keep him safe.”

Wordlessly, Marco stepped past both of them—reached out to touch Garrett—tugged on the boy’s arm, tried to drag him out of the way. Garrett might have been carved out of stone for all the difference it made.

“Where were you, Jake? Why are _you_ standing _there_ while _he’s_ in here dodging blaster bolts?”

“I—”

“You _promised,”_ Tobias repeated, and he planted both hands on Jake’s chest and shoved. Jake staggered, falling back several steps before regaining his balance, and Tobias followed immediately, fury etched in every line of his face. _“Look at him,_ Jake.”

“Tobias—” Marco began, his tone somewhere between a warning and a plea.

“Shut up, Marco,” Tobias snarled. He stepped forward and gave Jake another shove, pushing the heavier boy back toward the edge of the pool. Jake made no move to defend himself, his arms hanging limply by his sides, his expression stricken. “You sent him in here to _die.”_

“Tobias, stop!” Marco called out.

“No.” The word was quiet, almost calm, as cold and dark as obsidian. Cocking his arm back, Tobias swung, the punch catching Jake full in the face, sending a spray of blood through the frozen smoke.

Jake fell without making a sound as Marco lunged forward, reaching out to grab Tobias’s shoulder. I felt a flash of déjà vu as the taller boy whirled, sinking his fist directly into Marco’s stomach, folding him in half. Marco dropped like a stone, a horrible wheezing noise clawing its way from his throat.

I didn’t know what to do. What to say. How to react, other than by standing there, horrified. I was transfixed, paralyzed, frozen with indecision.

_Useless—as usual._

On the ground, Jake was rolling over, was already up on hands and knees. Tobias waited as he slowly climbed back to his feet, then punched him again, this time catching him on the temple. I let out a wordless shout as Jake fell again, more unevenly this time, skidding backwards until he was just a few feet away from the gaping, open hole.

“I swear to God,” Tobias bit out. “If he dies—if you don’t find a way to _fix_ this—”

He broke off mid-sentence, grabbing the front of Jake’s shirt and hauling him to his feet, holding their faces inches apart.

_Do something!_

Jake’s head lolled, his eyelids opening and closing in slow motion. “I will take you _down,”_ Tobias pronounced. “If I never do anything else—if I have to go to Visser fucking Three for help—if my best friend dies because _you weren’t there to save him—”_

“Tobias, wait!” I blurted, starting forward—

“One more step, Cassie. Go ahead—see what happens if you take one more step.”

I froze. “He _volunteered,_ Tobias,” I pleaded. “It wasn’t what you—Jake tried to talk him _out_ of it—”

“Tried.” Tobias threw me a withering glare, turned back to Jake. “Did you _try_ , Jake? Was it just _too hard_ for you to tell the eleven year old with the diagnosis _no, you can’t go on any suicide missions this week?_ You couldn’t send Marco or Cassie instead? I see you managed to keep _them_ out of trouble.” He took a step forward, putting both of them on the very edge of the abyss. “Where were you, Jake? ‘Cause I looked all around, and I didn’t _see_ you here—”

He broke off as Jake mumbled something, a trickle of blood appearing at the corner of his mouth and running down his chin, dripping onto Tobias’s hands where they still gripped Jake’s shirt. “What was that, Jake?” he spat.

“My fault,” Jake repeated, the words crystal clear in the stillness of the tableau vivant. “Knew he might die. Took the risk.”

Tobias’s face whitened as he shook the heavier boy, still holding him inches from the lip. “ _You_ took—”

“Said it was the right thing,” Jake continued, his voice hollow but steady. “Said he wasn’t going to give up just because it was hard. Said the world was in trouble, and he wasn’t the kind of person who backs down.”

The words had an immediate and dramatic effect on Tobias, falling like hammer blows, his grip on Jake’s shirt loosening with each one as his expression morphed swiftly from one of rage to one of utter despair. “I—” he stammered. “That’s not—you—”

“Wanted me to tell you, if he died—that he wasn’t afraid.”

It was as if Tobias were a puppet, and Jake had cut the strings. He let go, and both of them sagged, Jake dropping to brace his hands on his knees, Tobias sinking all the way to the ground. Without another word, the orphan boy began to cry, giant sobs wracking his body.

 _Good thing nobody’s relying on_ you _to think fast in a crisis_ , said the voice in my head, useless and savage and post hoc as usual. _At least Marco tried, even if all he managed to do was get the wind knocked out of him._

For a long moment, I just stood there, watching as Jake and Marco slowly recovered, as Tobias cried himself out. Around us, the nightmare waited, smoke and fire and horror and death all frozen in a timeless moment.

 _And what are_ you _waiting for, girl?_

For Jake and Marco, I realized. For one of them to straighten up, and tell me what to do.

I felt a lot of things over the next couple of seconds—a complicated whirl of doubts and recriminations, guilt and anxiety and resentment and resolve all swirling around a single word, outlined in fire in my thoughts:

_Enough._

“Crayak!” I shouted, causing Jake and Marco to jump and Tobias’s sobs to falter. “Ellimist! Whoever you are—we’re all waiting on you, now!”

THEN WAIT NO LONGER.

The response was immediate, the voice coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was bigger than sound, bigger than thought-speak, bigger than language itself. It simply _was_ , like the force of gravity—irresistible and inevitable.

The air directly in front of me—no not in front, behind. Beside. Around—

I couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t comprehend it. The air just opened up. As if there were a door in nothingness. As if air were solid, and—

It was just impossible to explain. The air opened up. A creature appeared.

It was humanoid. Two arms, two legs, a head in the same place that a human’s head would be. Its skin was blue, glowing faintly like a lightbulb that had been painted over. It looked old, but not frail—like my grandfather, who’d worked fifty years on a farm and could put the lid on a jar so tight that none of the rest of us could get it off again. Its hair was long and white, covering ears that were swept up into points, parting over pitch-black eyes that seemed to be full of stars.

“Are you—” Marco began, his voice still breathy and hoarse. He was standing upright, though he had one hand pressed over his stomach, and there were tears sparkling at the corners of his eyes. “Is that your real body?”

The creature smiled, its ears sliding upwards until they were almost touching. “No,” it answered, its voice like wind chimes. “I have a lot of faces. This one—”

It paused, and shrugged. “I dunno. Seemed like the right one to use.”

“What are you?” Jake asked, peering through eyes that were beginning to swell shut.

The creature shrugged again. “Got a lot of names, too. Call me whatever you like.”

“You did this?” Jake gestured to the sculpted figures around us.

“Well, not _really._ Most of it was your friends over there. But the whole thing being on pause—that was me, yeah.”

“Why?”

“So you’d have a chance to take a good look,” it said. “And to give us time to talk.”

Raising its hands, the creature traced out a complicated pattern in midair, and suddenly a chair appeared—first an outline, then a solid object as the sides faded in from nothingness. It spun gently and settled silently to the floor, scooting forward just as the creature sat back.

Tobias pushed himself to his feet, his face streaked and sooty, his clothes covered in ash and dust. “You’re the one Elfangor told us about,” he said. “The one we might call God. You can do magic.”

“Science,” the creature corrected softly. “Engineering.”

“You stopped time. Brought me all the way here from D.C. Brought me out of morph and teleported me three thousand miles.”

“Yes.”

Tobias pointed at the pair of blaster bolts hovering behind Rachel and Garrett. “Change it,” he said flatly.

“I will,” the creature said solemnly. “Or at least, I _can._ But first, you need some context. You see, they’re not the only ones in danger. A lot of people are about to die, and you have some decisions to make.”

“No shit,” Marco said. “The whole building’s ready to collapse.”

The creature shook its head. “I’m not talking about the people in the building,” it said, and I felt my blood run cold. “I think you forgot about Visser Three.”

 

*        *        *

 

We were floating in space, somehow—a hundred miles up, or maybe a thousand, floating without spacesuits, breathing without air. It wasn’t cold or uncomfortable—just quiet, as it had been back in the pool. For a long, long minute, the creature let us stare at the Earth, huge and impossibly beautiful, filling half the sky. We could see all of California—Oregon—Nevada. The snow-dusted wrinkles of mountain ranges, the flat browns of deserts, the patchy greens of forests and fields. The coastlines were as clear and sharp as if they’d been carved out by a razor blade, with light, fluffy clouds drifting glacially over the ocean, casting dark blue shadows.

LOVELY, the omnipresent voice said, the creature’s body having failed to follow us. LOVELY.

We said nothing—only stared, drinking it in, until some unseen force moved us, swung us around, turned us outward to face the darkness.

There, some immeasurable distance away, glistening faintly in the starlight, was an enormous, misshapen sphere, almost as black as the sky around it. A small cluster of silver boxes were embedded in the surface at one end, each with a cone of frozen light emerging from it, pointing exactly away from the blue sphere of the Earth.

“What is this?” Marco asked, not even bothering to complain about the impossibilities anymore.

IT’S VISSER THREE’S BACKUP PLAN, said the voice. HE SENT TEAMS OUT TO FIND IT WEEKS AGO, AS SOON AS YOU STARTED CAUSING TROUBLE—DRAGGED IT BEHIND THE MOON AND SLAPPED A CLOAKING DEVICE ON IT. NOW IT’S HEADING FOR EARTH AT A HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND MILES PER HOUR.

“ _What?”_ Jake spluttered.

WHEN IT HITS, IT WILL MAKE A FIREBALL EIGHT MILES WIDE, AND LEAVE A CRATER ALMOST TEN MILES ACROSS. THE SHOCKWAVE WILL SHATTER WINDOWS AS FAR AS FIFTY MILES AWAY, AND THAT PLUS THE HEAT WILL KILL EVERYTHING FROM SOMERTON TO GRANITE HEIGHTS. THE YEERK POOL WILL BE COMPLETELY DISINTEGRATED, ALL EVIDENCE ERASED, AND THE CITY AND THE SURROUNDING AREA—INCLUDING YOUR LITTLE HIDDEN VALLEY—WILL BE WIPED OFF THE MAP.

I felt my throat constrict, felt my fingers and toes begin to tingle as my blood pooled in my chest and adrenaline began to slice its way through my veins.

VISSER THREE KNOWS YOU’VE DESTROYED THE POOL. IN A FEW HOURS, THE FIRST YEERKS WILL BEGIN STARVING, AND SOON THERE WILL BE AN EPIDEMIC. IT’S TOO RISKY TO RELY ON A CONTAINMENT STRATEGY. ONE MISTAKE—ONE PIECE OF CREDIBLE EVIDENCE SLIPPING PAST THE NET, AND THE SECRET WILL BE OUT. THIS WAY IS QUICKER—CLEANER—SIMPLER.

I turned to look at Jake, took in the dull hopelessness that seemed to wrap his entire body, felt my own shoulders slump in response. Beyond him, Marco’s face was twisted and grim, his jaw working silently, his knuckles white.

AN IMPACT OF THIS MAGNITUDE OCCURS EVERY FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS OR SO, the voice continued. IT WILL BE SURPRISING, BUT NOT SHOCKING. YOUR SCIENTISTS WILL CONFIRM THAT IT WAS A METEOR STRIKE AND NOTHING MORE. THEY’LL TESTIFY THAT THE ROCK WAS SMALL ENOUGH THAT CURRENT NORMAL SCANNING WOULD NEVER HAVE DETECTED IT. THERE WILL BE A PUSH FOR INCREASED MONITORING OF THE SKY, AND VISSER THREE’S PLANS WILL BE SLIGHTLY HAMPERED BY THIS, BUT IT WILL BE A SMALL PRICE TO PAY FOR THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE HAS ERADICATED THE GUERILLA THREAT.

I blinked, and suddenly we were back at the pool, surrounded by rubble and smoke and cold, crystallized fire. The creature was unmoved, still sitting in its conjured chair, its expression drawn and sympathetic.

“He knows that you aren’t particularly mobile, see,” the creature said, speaking with its physical voice. “And he knows that you’re at the pool, right now. There’s _zero_ chance that you’d survive the impact.”

“But—the shield—the tardigrades—”

“The shield was destroyed, on Visser Three’s orders, but it wouldn’t have saved you anyway. The word ‘indestructible’ is a little misleading—Seerow’s engineering is impressive, but it can’t compete with an explosion the size of a million atomic bombs. Even the Chee will be killed, if they don’t realize what’s happening in time to run.”

I felt my jaw tremble, felt my knees go weak. It was hard to breathe, hard to speak—hard to _think_. I looked at the three boys, saw their faces reflecting my own as the meaning of the creature’s words sank in.

We were all going to die.

“How—” I began, my voice thick and rasping. “How long?”

“About thirty more minutes,” the creature said. “The Visser fired the rockets as soon as the explosion in the pool was confirmed.”

Thirty minutes. Our fastest morph over long distances was the snipe, which could make it maybe thirty two miles in thirty minutes, if we could push the body to the absolute limit. Call it twenty-five miles, with morphing time—would that be enough? If we found a lake to dive into, or a mountain to hide behind?

I looked at Jake. He didn’t have the snipe morph. He would have to acquire it from me, losing an extra minute and a half in the process. Meanwhile, Marco and Tobias would have to take off before me, or else the interference would keep them from being able to fly at all. They could leave immediately, while I stayed behind for a few extra seconds with Jake—

Tobias shifted, raising a hand to wipe at his eyes. “You said you would save Garrett,” he said, his tone somewhere between entreaty and accusation.

“I said I _could_ ,” the creature corrected mildly. “I can save all of you, in fact. But it’s not quite as simple as snapping my fingers.”

Tobias tilted his head, his eyes narrowing. There was a long, tense moment as we all weighed the creature’s words, absorbed the sudden, subtle shift in mood. I didn’t have Jake’s razor-keen sense for implication and nuance, but even I could hear the threat implied by the oh-so-casual words—the bait and switch, the clever trap, the offer we couldn’t refuse. _Sure,_ the creature seemed to be saying. _I can do it—but it’s gonna cost you._

“What do you mean?” Tobias asked, his words slow and careful. “Just unfreeze them, and we all walk away.”

“Like I said, not that simple.”

“What? Why?”

“The game,” Marco said darkly.

“Yes,” the creature confirmed. “There are rules. Penalties. Restrictions.”

“What game?”

“There are two of them,” Marco explained. “Don’t you remem—never mind, that’s right, you were off babysitting Ax.” He chewed at his lip, looking back and forth between the creature and the ruins of the Yeerk pool. “Crayak and Ellimist. God and Satan, black and white—or at least red and blue, Elfangor wasn’t really sure. Two extremely powerful beings with very different ideas of how the universe ought to look.”

“Order and chaos,” said the creature. “Unity and harmony. Silence and noise. A fundamental conflict of values.” It gestured toward the nightmare scene around us. “One of us would like more of— _this_. The other, less. We almost came to blows, once—a fight that would have thrown the resources of whole galaxies against one another, laying waste to infinity. But we realized that we were headed toward mutual annihilation—that by the time we’d finished hacking at each other, the winner would be left with almost nothing—a shadow of its former self, an emperor of dust.”

“So why didn’t you just _stop?”_ I blurted.

The four of them turned to look at me, Jake and Marco and Tobias and the strange, ancient alien. I felt my face flush with heat, a mixture of self-consciousness and anger fighting for control of my voice, my thoughts. Anger won, and I crossed my arms, glaring at the ancient alien.

“Elfangor said we were like chess pieces to you,” I bit out. “Like you’re manipulating us, or—or _gambling_ with us. That this is all some kind of huge game, and you’re waiting to see how it all plays out. _Why?_ Why not just—leave one another alone?”

Even before I finished the sentence, I knew it was stupid—I knew about the US and the Soviet Union, and about wars that started because of genocide and human rights violations, about people cheating on each other in prisoner’s dilemmas. I knew that _two_ was an unstable equilibrium, and that one way or another there would always be a race to the bottom.

But deep down, in the core of my soul, it just seemed _wrong._ Like it shouldn’t have to be that way, like people should be able to just _stop._ That there ought to be a way to solve things that _wasn’t_ terrible, and that obvious answers should _work_ , no matter how many kinks and flaws and loopholes there might be.

I didn’t know if the creature in front of me had sent the Yeerks. But it could obviously stop them—stop them without bloodshed, stop them fully and finally and save everyone the trouble. It could, and it wasn’t going to, and it just wasn’t _fair._

The creature didn’t mock my flawed argument, though—didn’t point out my naïveté. It simply shrugged. “Who can say? I can speak only for myself. I didn’t _want_ to leave half the universe—half of everything that lives and breathes and thinks—under the control of my enemy. I didn’t _want_ to live the rest of my life on alert, always waiting for the moment of betrayal. I didn’t _want_ to spend ninety nine percent of my time and energy building weapons and stockpiling resources and setting up counter-counter-counter-counter-counter surveillance, lest I fall behind.”

“So, what—you play some giant cosmic chess game, and the loser just _agrees to die?”_ Tobias asked, incredulous. “I mean, that’s what you’re talking about, right? If you can’t trust each other no matter what, then that’s what happens at the end—isn’t it?”

The creature nodded.

“But that’s _insane!”_ Tobias shouted. “It doesn’t make any _sense!_ You’re going to finish the game, and then the loser’s just going to flip the table and start shooting anyway!”

The creature shook its head. “The game is binding, on every level. Bit by bit, molecule by molecule, we each fed our resources into a shared structure which cannot be coopted or corrupted, leaving only the most rudimentary backups behind. The arbiter is more powerful than either of us at this point, and a sufficient infraction means immediate forfeiture and death. Together, we ratified the initial conditions, and now—”

It shrugged again. “Now, we simply play.”

“But why agree to the game in the first place?” Jake said, speaking up for the first time in minutes. “I mean, if you’re going to win anyway, why bother? And if you’re going to lose, why would the _other_ one agree? You can’t possibly be perfectly matched— _somebody’s_ got to have the advantage.”

“Your definitions are narrow,” the creature said. “One may be smarter, where the other is stronger. One may have vision, where the other has patience.”

“But there’s still got to be a total, right? Some kind of—summary? Taking all of that into account?”

“Something can be knowable, but still not known. I could ask you to tell me how many pennies your country has minted in its entire history—that’s a question with a real, specific answer, but it’s _expensive_ to find out.”

“But _still_ —if you both agreed to the game, it’s because you _both_ thought it was better for you than just fighting it out.”

“Is that so unrealistic? Instead of taking a chance at an empty, ruined universe, we take a chance at winning everything. Defeat is the same in either case, but victory is vastly different.”

“But defeat’s _not_ the same in either case,” Jake said, his voice rising. “I mean, if you literally couldn’t stand to let the other guy have _half_ of everything, you definitely don’t want to let him walk away with _all_ of it, right? If you’re going to lose, don’t you _want_ to hurt the other guy as much as you can, first? And besides, you’ve got—I mean, Marco said you could control _individual molecules._ You _stopped time._ You’ve got to be able to calculate _everything,_ right? I mean, you’ve got to already _know_ whether you’re going to win or lose. And playing the game only makes sense if you think you’re going to win, so—so if you _both_ think that, doesn’t it mean that one of you is just _wrong?”_

The creature smiled, the sparks of light in its deep, black eyes glittering like the inside of a geode. “Yes, Jake Berenson. One of us is wrong, and only time will tell which. I have my own opinions, of course, which I’ll keep private. But in the meantime—it’s my turn, and events have conspired to give me unusual freedom of movement.”

With a swift, sudden motion, the creature sprang to its feet, the chair vanishing out from underneath it as we each took a reflexive step back. “So!” it boomed, the wind chime quality of its voice swelling into something more like church bells. “Human children—do you wish for me to save you? I won’t stop the meteor—I can’t, not without incurring debts I’m not particularly interested in owing. But I can whisk you off to safety, if you ask it of me.”

“What about Garrett?” Tobias cut in.

“And Rachel and Ax,” Jake added.

“The four of you are my primary concern,” the creature said. “You are the bishops, the knights, the rooks. For the time being, at least, the game revolves around you—your decisions, your fate.”

Tobias’s face reddened, his hands clenching into fists. “You said—”

“I said it wasn’t that simple. I can save more than just the four of you—one more for each, perhaps—but it comes at a price.”

“What price?”

“Conservation,” the creature said. “I take so much matter from _here_ and move it to _there_ —at some point in time, the game will allow my enemy to do the same.”

“What? But that’s—”

“Twenty billion billion billion atoms shifted by fifty miles, or one atom shifted by a thousand billion billion billion. Enough energy to fuel a nuclear blast. It is—not insignificant, in a game such as ours.”

I felt my breath catch in my throat. The math—it didn’t particularly make sense, to me. The numbers were too big. But the _other_ half of the problem—

I locked eyes with Jake, saw in an instant that he understood it, too. He gazed back at me for a timeless moment, his expression close and guarded, and then turned to look at Marco.

Marco, whose face was twisted and pained, his eyes suddenly wide with emotion.

“Garrett,” Tobias said, ignoring the silent conversation going on around him. “Save Garrett. Please.”

“And Rachel,” said Jake, the name sounding like it was being torn out of him. He stared at Marco, and the other boy stared back, the two of them communicating on some level deeper than thought-speak.

 _I can’t do this,_ whispered a voice in my head.

 _You’d better,_ answered another.

“Ax,” Marco finally muttered, his jaw tight.

They turned to look at me.

_Can’t do this can’t do this can not do this._

_You HAVE to. No way you’re letting somebody die just because you didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings._

Tobias was an orphan. So was Garrett. Rachel had family, but there were too many of them to save—her dad, her mom, her two sisters. And _my_ parents were already dead.

“Cassie—” Marco began, but Jake cut him off.

“ _No,_ Marco.”

Frowning, Tobias looked back and forth between the three of us, his mouth half-opened in an unspoken question. Suddenly, it clicked, his eyes widening as he figured it out.

Jake had a big family, too—his parents, his grandparents, his cousins on his mom’s side. But the person he cared about the most was his big brother Tom.

And Marco? Marco had nobody—except his father.

“I—” I began, my throat dry and tight. “I can’t—”

“Yes, you can, Cassie,” Jake said, his voice low and heavy. “This is _your choice_ , not ours.” Beside him, Marco grimaced, his eyes glistening, but he nodded.

The thing was, I really _couldn’t._ They might _think_ they’d be okay with whatever I chose, but I knew them—knew them both. It was one thing to lose a family member because of circumstances outside your control. It was something else to know you _might_ have been able to save them—to know they’d been _traded_ for someone else. If I picked either one, it would be the end of Jake and Marco’s friendship, and if I picked neither, all their resentment and bitterness would fall on _me._

I fought for an answer, my thoughts and emotions churning, searching for any possible way out of the decision. My eyes darted around the frozen nightmare, looking anywhere but Jake and Marco—at Tobias, at the creature, at the figures lying on the ground, hovering in the air, clinging to the bars of the broken, twisted cage—

I stopped.

The boy. The boy, holding on to the cage. He was maybe six or seven years old, his clothes and face black with soot, his mouth open in a timeless scream.

I looked at Jake.

I looked at Marco.

I looked at the creature, and I did the math in my head again—ninety seconds to morph, then twenty-eight and a half minutes—twenty-eight and a half miles, at a mile per minute.

I looked back at the boy, at the lines of the tendons in his arm as he held on with all his might. He was close to the outer wall, just a few steps away from a gap where the bricks had buckled and burned, letting sunlight in.

I could make it.

I could make it.

I could make it, and for once, I could _do_ something. Could take action, get my hands dirty, maybe make a difference.

Not for everybody. But for somebody. For one, single person. It wouldn’t change much, if I pulled it off—wouldn’t save the hundreds who’d already died or the thousands who were about to.

But it would be something—and I was tired of doing nothing.

“Marco’s dad,” I said, “and Jake’s brother Tom.” I looked into the creature’s eyes, making sure it understood.

“Wait—what?”

“Cassie, _no!”_

The creature nodded, and raised its hands as it had when it conjured the chair.

“No!” Jake shouted. “Stop!”

“What’s going—”

“Cassie’s trying to stay behind—”

“ _What_ —”

“Shut up,” I said, fighting to keep the quaver out of my voice. “My choice, not yours.”

“Cassie, this is _suicide—”_

“It isn’t. I can make it out. The snipe, remember?”

“Jake, she’s lost it—”

“Cassie—”

“Wait!” Tobias called out, his voice cutting through Jake and Marco’s objections. “Hang on a second—”

Raising an accusatory finger, he spun, rounding on the ancient creature. “You cheated,” he said. “You said you’d save the four of us and four other people, but I wouldn’t even _need_ saving if you hadn’t brought me here. I shouldn’t count. You can bring Cassie _and_ Tom and Marco’s dad.”

The shadow of a smile flickered across the creature’s face. “You have a—” it began.

“No,” I insisted. “If we get an extra person, save Erek. I’m going after the kid.”

“ _Cassie, forget the robot, just let HIM save the—”_

IT IS DONE.

There was no other warning. Without the slightest transition, I found myself once more in the woods, squinting in the patchy sunlight, wearing a Hork-Bajir’s body with half a dozen weapons strapped to my chest. Jake and Marco were nowhere to be seen.

_No!_

The creature had dropped me outside, in morph—I was half a mile away from the pool, and the kid was already dangling—

I burst from the undergrowth, tossing guns and ammunition aside as I sprinted forward. The Hork-Bajir body was awkward on flat ground, but it made up for it in sheer power, its massive legs long since adapted to the higher gravity of Earth. Up ahead, smoke continued to pour out of the YMCA, the flames licking up the sides of the building as the firefighters struggled to beat them back.

_Go._

I started demorphing as I ran, trying to control the process so that I would end just as I reached the building, keeping my legs as long as possible. There were a hundred Controllers in sight, but none of them were paying any attention to me, their eyes all locked on the wreckage of their city, their temple, their home.

_Go._

I could feel my lungs beginning to burn as they emerged from Z-space, feel the throb of blood pressure in my temple. I had never been athletic, but it didn’t matter—a little boy’s life was at stake and I _was not_ about to quit.

 _You should have let the creature save the kid,_ the voice in my head snarled. _Let him save the kid, and just flown away yourself. If he dies_ now _, it’s your fault—_

But he wasn’t going to die. I knew it in my heart, in my bones. It wouldn’t happen, not now—not when I had finally, _finally_ found a way to do something pure and unequivocal and good. It was one tiny bright spot, in all the death and horror—just one insignificant, inadequate gesture—but it was _my_ bright spot, and I wasn’t about to let it go.

I blew past the Controllers in the parking lot, my sneakers slapping against the asphalt as I made a beeline for the hole in the wall. I felt the last traces of Hork-Bajir physiology disappear as I neared the building, felt myself become fully human just before I crossed over into the darkness and smoke.

Almost immediately, I began to hack and wheeze, my eyes watering as my aching lungs pulled in what felt like an entire roomful of smoke. Blind, coughing, I stumbled and dropped to my knees, crawling forward as I felt my way toward the cage.

“Are you there?” I screamed. The air was full of noise—the cries of the wounded, the roar of the fire, the hissing of water as the firefighters rained down a hundred gallons a second.

“Help!” came a voice, a few feet to my left. “Help—I can’t—”

I was already there, forcing my burning eyes to open, reaching out to grab the boy’s wrist. “Gotcha!” I shouted. “Climb!”

Leaning back, I hauled him up and over the lip, rolled him past me onto level ground, both of us gasping and coughing. “Mom!” he cried out. “Where’s mom—”

_Not a Controller, then._

“I don’t know,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm and reassuring. “But I’m going to get you out of here, okay? I’m going to get you out, and we’ll find her—she’s outside, we’ll find her once we’re safe—”

“Mom!” the boy shouted again, and he lunged toward the light, toward the hole in the wall, the outside world.

“No!” I called out, grabbing his ankle and dragging him back. He screamed and kicked, and I pulled him closer, catching his wrists. “Wait! Listen! There’s a—a bomb coming, it’s coming down from space, the bad guys sent it to blow everybody up because we broke the Yeerk pool—”

The boy stopped struggling at the word _bomb_ —stopped struggling and turned to look at me, his eyes wide with fear—

“—and I can get you out but you have to trust me, you have to hold on and I’m going to—I’m going to change, okay?”

“What about my mom?” he pleaded, his eyes darting left and right.

“I’ve got—my friends are here,” I lied, desperate to _get moving_ , to get the boy inside my morph and get out. It must have been at least three minutes since time had restarted—three minutes, maybe more. “They’re here, they’ll find her and get her out, but you’ve got to _hold on to me now, okay?_ Hold on and don’t let go, I’m going to transform, and you’re going to transform too, we’re going to turn into a bird and fly away.”

It sounded like nonsense— _was_ nonsense, for all that it was completely true—but the little boy didn’t move as I pulled him close, stayed still as I kept babbling. All across my skin, the hairs began to swell, fanning out and becoming feathers, turning black all over except for the patch below my chin.

“Just hang on, we’re going to get out of here, and we’re going to go find your mom—”

Lies, but lies in the service of a greater good—they rolled off my tongue without guilt or hesitation. Pressing his head to my chest, I forced my will onto the morphing routine, and sent his mind into stasis, slowly stuffing the rest of him into myself like a blanket going into a pillowcase. It was horrible and strange, not at all like any other morph I’d done, and if I’d had a normal human stomach I think I would have thrown up.

_—saving him you’re saving him you’re going to save his life that’s all that matters he can be as sad as he wants about his mom but he’ll be alive because of you—_

I took off while the morph was still partially incomplete, my body heavy, my wings awkward and slow. I fought for altitude, angling through the gap and out into the sunlight, growing lighter with each passing second. Fifty wingbeats, and the transformation was complete; a hundred, and I was flying as fast as I ever had—as fast as I’d flown on the night I’d failed to save my dad.

How much time had I spent in the Yeerk pool? I wanted to get as far away as I could, but I also wanted to be out of the air when the meteor hit—under water, or behind something sturdy—

TSEEEWWWWWWWW!

<AHHHHHHH!>

I rolled in midair, banking and plummeting like a stone as another Dracon beam passed through the space I’d just been occupying.

_Bug fighter!_

I couldn’t see the craft—it was cloaked, and I didn’t dare slow down long enough to tease out the telltale distortion that was visible to the snipe’s eye. Shedding another twenty feet of altitude, I changed direction and began pumping for speed again.

TSEEEWWWWWWWW!

TSEEEWWWWWWWW!

That time, the beams came close enough to singe the feathers on one of my wings. <No!> I shouted, changing direction yet again, this time climbing for height. If the craft was close by, I should be able to shake it, but if it was firing from a distance—

TSEEEWWWWWWWW!

Hit.

Pain.

Fall.

I was only a second or so from the ground by the time my head cleared, and the best I could do was flare my remaining wing and brace for impact. I landed with a dull _thud_ , feeling the snipe’s legs snap like twigs.

_No._

_No, no, no, no, no, no, no—_

The ground was covered in rocks and bushes, and I quickly rolled under cover, ignoring the screaming pain of my broken bones and the unnerving emptiness where my wing was supposed to be. Above me, I felt rather than heard the Bug fighter pass overhead—a thick, buzzing vibration, a sense of something vast and ponderous. It couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty feet above the ground, moving slower than a car.

Searching.

_Demorph—demorph, and remorph, you won’t be able to get all the way out of the blast zone but you can find a cave a lake a rock—_

Except that if I demorphed now, with nothing but a scrubby bush to hide under, they would _absolutely_ see me. And I’d have to keep the boy quiet, explain what had happened, get him back into the morph a second time—

I stayed put, feeling the snipe body growing weaker by the second, _counting_ the seconds in my head as my heartbeat became more and more sluggish.

Fifty.

One hundred.

One fifty.

Two hundred.

There wasn’t really a moment— _one moment_ when I knew that it was too late, that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to make it out of the blast zone. It was more of a gradual thing, a slow settling of despair as the last shreds of hope slipped out of my grasp.

I had failed.

I had failed, and I was going to die. In twenty minutes, the asteroid would hit, not even a mile away, and the blast was going to kill me.

It was less distressing than I’d thought it would be. I wasn’t sure why—maybe it had something to do with all of the other people who’d be going with me, or with my parents, or with the fact that I knew the others had all made it out alive. Maybe I was just tired—delirious, as the snipe began to lose consciousness and drift into the darkness.

But either way, it was almost peaceful. I was _free_. There was nothing left to do—nothing left to prove—nobody to impress. It didn’t _matter_ whether I was a good person or a bad one, whether Jake was proud of me or not, whether the real Cassie was the girl I tried to be or the girl I was when I wasn’t trying.

Beating my one wing against the ground, I tried to roll over, to turn one eye toward the sky, but I couldn’t do it. Giving up, I stayed face down, my beak pressing into the dirt, the sun warming the feathers on my back.

_I’m sorry, Dad._

I listened to the chirping of the crickets, the whispering of the grass and the breeze, the distant sound of the burning building. I thought about Peppermint, and what it had been like to live inside her body for a while—the grace, the power, the freedom. I thought about third grade, and I thought about college, and I thought about the Gardens—about the otters, who were my favorite, who knew me when I went to visit them.

I thought about Jake.

He would blame himself, I knew. For letting me go, for not stopping me. For making it, when I didn’t. It would be hard for him, but he would have Tom there to help him through it. And besides, he was tough—tougher than he gave himself credit for.

_What’s the last thing you want to think about, girl?_

I closed my eyes, each breath a little shallower than the last. I wanted to think about a book— _Where the Wild Things Are_ , by Maurice Sendak. My favorite book, when I was just learning how to read, when I thought the monsters in it were real, that I could meet them someday. I thought about Max, in his animal suit, sailing across the wild sea. I thought about the wild things—how they turned out to be friendly, and made him their king. I thought about the end of the story, when he sailed back home, and his supper was still hot.

I let out one last breath, and I thought about nothing.

There was light.

And heat.

And noise.

And silence.


	22. Interlude 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tobias will be posted this week, hopefully by Wednesday but definitely by Saturday evening PST. If you feel like supporting, my Patreon is at patreon dot com slash sabien.

**Interlude—before**  

 

“I shouldn’t count,” said the gangly orphan boy, Tobias. “You can bring Cassie _and_ Tom and Marco’s dad.”

The player tweaked the controls on its physical avatar, lifting the lips a small distance, crinkling the skin near the corners of the eyes. In an infinitesimal fraction of a second, the player composed a message, translated it, transcribed it into code and entered it into the simulation. “You have a point,” came the words, the _you_ subtly emphasized.

Another adjustment, and the avatar turned toward the girl, Cassie. “Is that what _you_ want?”

The girl hesitated. “I—” she began, and then faltered. “I’m not—”

In another dimension, on another plane of existence, an alert sounded, and with little more than a thought, the player terminated the simulation. Yet again, the odds of success had dropped below the necessary threshold.

The player surveyed the landscape, adjusting its time horizon. The search space was large, almost unmanageably so—trillions of bits of data, in a fractal of chaotic organization, from quarks all the way up to bodies and buildings. An uncountable number of levers, of lines of influence, and few clues to make the relevant distinct from the meaningless.

Yet every scrap of efficiency mattered. Every effort not taken, every force left unleveraged, each molecule undisturbed. The simulation was infinitely malleable, and could be altered arbitrarily, but reality was ponderous, and changes costly to make. There could be endless ways to produce the desired effect, and none of them would matter if they weren’t _practical_ —if they required too great an investment, burned too many resources. The rules of the game were clear—when the moment came, there could be no discrepancies between the true pool and the projection, no unfair manipulation via cheap and easy deception. It had to be real, down to the smallest peak in the quantum wave function.

A calculation ended, and a list expanded, highlighting every possible point of intervention given the data from the most recent iteration. An algorithm began, guided by the player’s instincts—filtering, narrowing, refining the list until a manageable billion options remained. Selecting from among them—a breeze minutely strengthened, so that a passing chill made a woman go back for her coat—the player began the simulation once more, carrying it up to the critical moment—

“I shouldn’t count,” said Tobias. “You can bring Cassie _and_ Tom and Marco’s dad.”

The player tweaked the controls on its physical avatar, lifting the lips a small distance, crinkling the skin near the corners of the eyes. In an infinitesimal fraction of a second, the player composed a message, translated it, transcribed it into code and entered it into the simulation. “You have a—”

“No,” Cassie began—

“Cassie, _listen_ ,” said one of the other boys—the stocky one, the leader—Jake Berenson. “This isn’t—”

Once more, the alert sounded, and once more, the player terminated the simulation. A cascade of data flowed into its analysis, from the beat of Cassie’s heart to the ebb and flow of neurotransmitters in her brain. Subroutines analyzed every sight she had taken in, every sound that had registered, the twists and turns of her emotional state. Flags were dropped in a thousand different places, indicating a thousand possible branches to explore, and those thousand branches were fed back into the higher routine, where some were considered and evaluated and others summarily discarded.

Slowly, the player moved closer.

 

*        *        *

 

**Interlude—during**

 

We do not understand. Six-three-four-eight-one was _here_ , and now six-three-four-eight-one is _there_ —

[Danger! Peter Levy and Tom Berenson are Controllers—they will injure Ax!]

Then we must intervene, of course. But what has _happened?_

[Two, have you moved?]

[No. Has three?]

[No. Has four?]

[No. Has five?]

[No. Has six?]

…

…

…

…

[No. Has one-three-nine-three-two-zero?]

[No. Has one-three-nine-three-two-one?]

[No.]

Only six-three-four-eight-one. We do not understand. It is teleportation, but _teleportation_ is only a word; it is not a _meaning._ It is not a _how_ or a _why_.

[We have the situation under control. Peter Levy and Tom Berenson will not injure Ax. Based on the interlink signals, these others with me are Jake Berenson, Marco Levy, Garrett Steinberg, and the female.]

We do not understand. Where are their construct bodies?

[They do not have any.]

This is not a _meaning._

[They are emerging directly from the gate, with no construct to disassemble.]

This is not a _meaning._

[There is no evidence of footsteps or other disturbances to the area around us. Whatever process brought us here likely also brought Peter Levy and Tom Berenson and Ax and the gates of Jake Berenson, Marco Levy, Garrett Steinberg, and the female.]

We are reviewing our memories of the moment of transition.

They do not provide clarity.

We are communicating with Peter Levy and Tom Berenson.

[They are not providing clarity.]

Perhaps we will communicate with Jake Berenson, when he has fully emerged? Jake Berenson has provided clarity, in the past, as has Marco Levy—

[It will have to wait. Sergeant Pepper has decided to join the game.]

We are happy. Sergeant Pepper did not like leaving the yard, and has not played as often as he did before. It is good to see him running alongside the others. Monty and Daisy in particular are very excited to see him—Monty nipping at his heels, Daisy racing out ahead to impel him to greater speed.

[Should we produce the stick?]

[Not yet. This is a good chase. We should wait until it is over.]

We watch as Chance, Winston, Princess, and Bella break away from the rest of the pack, forming a second group that arcs away toward the far side of the yard before looping back, the two lines of dogs mixing and mingling in joyful chaos. Winston stops short, and Daisy crashes into him—

[Concern!]

—but they are both already back on their feet, running flat-out as they try to catch up with the others.

[The stick.]

[Or the ball.]

[Yes.]

Four-nine-nine-nine produces the stick. Heedless, Sergeant Pepper and Monty and Chance continue to run, but Daisy and Winston and Princess and Bella all come to a halt, their eyes wide and alert, their limbs quivering with barely contained excitement.

[Now?]

[Not yet.]

We _will_ throw the stick, but anticipation makes it all the sweeter—

[We must leave! At once!]

We do not understand at first, but seven-two-four-zero-seven’s memory is clear. We have very little time.

[Is it violence?]

We fall silent for a moment, thinking.

Yes, it is violence—on a scale we have not seen since the great war. But we cannot prevent it, not with so little time. We must preserve ourselves—

[And the dogs!]

Yes, of course, it goes without saying—

[This may be related to what has happened to six-three-four-eight-one.]

[Yes. It is. Somehow, we were moved to a safe distance.]

We have begun to evacuate. Sergeant Pepper and Monty and Chance and Daisy and Winston and Princess and Bella are the closest, and we gather them almost immediately. The Duke and Noam Chompsky and Akela and Julius and Lucy and Clifford and Maya and Marceline and Chester and Pupsicle and Buddy and Rocky and Toby and Molly and Ladybug and Puddles and Coco and Shadow and Duck and Madeline and Margaret Thatcher were all a little farther away, but they are safe now, we have them with us. And soon we will have Gizmo and Penny and Bentley and Spark Pug and Lulu and Pocahontas and Whuff and Luna and Dixie and Cheeto and Dipper and Maximus and Bean and Kitten and Bigfoot and Radar and New Yeller and the slightly larger Princess and the slightly smaller Monty and Bounder and Bolt and—

[The others!]

We are distressed. There are thousands of them—the ones without owners, and the ones whose owners are unaware.

[We have to try!]

[The risk of discovery—]

[We have already been discovered.]

It is true. We continue to hide, but we take less care with noise and pressure, moving quickly enough that even with holograms it is theoretically possible to track our movement. We rescue Spot, and Jasper, and Chip—

[The human. It is suffering.]

We feel sadness—the deep, echoing sadness that reminds us of—

[We will bring the human.]

[Careful! We cannot risk—]

[It is young. Its family will perish. Its domicile will be destroyed. There will be no evidence. We will keep it.]

We have done this before, on occasion—when discovered, or when it is the safest way to protect and care for a dog. We were not meant to care for humans, but we have learned how, and it is not difficult. We agree, and we carry on.

Hunter and Snuffles and two more Spots and another Bella and four strays on the street with no names—we will call them Godric, Salazar, Helga, and Rowena—and Spam and Bark Twain and Socks and Thor and Snowball and Richard Garfield, Ph.D and T-Bone and Peanut and Rex and John-John and Wendy and Sputnik and Oprah…

 

*        *        *

 

**Interlude—(long) after**

 

She is already crying, beneath the moonlight—tears streaming down her face as the change begins, as her skin lightens from the brown of dinosaur bones to peaches-and-cream, as her hair lengthens and unkinks and turns soft and silky. Her sobs are silent—restrained—but they shake her entire body, as if tearing their way out of her chest.

The tears flow right through the transformation, as she becomes he, as every trace of _her_ disappears back into the void, leaving only _him_ behind. For long, long minutes, he sits, silent, curled tight into a ball. He clutches his knees, his eyes squeezed shut, his lips bared in a rictus smile.

Eventually, he cries himself out—as he has before, as he always does—his face growing slack and hopeless, despair writ large in every muscle as he slumps, sideways, staring at nothing in particular.

And then a shadow flickers across his face—something dark and ugly, a grasping, frantic, desperate neediness, like a starving child, a caged animal, an addict in burning withdrawal. He grits his teeth and clenches his fists, the strength returning to his body, and his eyes focus—still distant, but very much on target.

The change begins—thick muscles dissolving into graceful, slender limbs, a jaw softening into roundness, dark stains spreading across his skin as he becomes her once again. A minute and a half, and she is there beneath the moonlight, her breath faintly misting, her heartbeat almost audible. She is _alive_ , and somewhere inside her head, he reaches for a door, and opens it.

‹Cassie,› he whispers. ‹It’s me.›

 

 


	23. Chapter 19: Tobias

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note: This is the complete version of Chapter 19, which had its first part published on 6/5/2016 and its second part published on 6/11/2016.
> 
> As always, I ask that you post comments, reviews, and critiques, either here or over on r/rational, where there's a lively discussion board with a lot of interesting thoughts and theorizing. We're somewhere in the vicinity of the halfway point, and I love hearing what people like, what people hate, what hints and clues people have noticed, and what conclusions they've drawn about the future. Your feedback keeps me going!
> 
> Lastly, I have a Patreon at patreon.com/sabien, and I appreciate every penny my readers are able to spare. I've got a cool project I'm saving the funds for (kids' rationality bootcamp) and I've recently had to put my own self-contributions to it on pause to deal with medical bills, so donations make a real difference.

 

_****_ **Chapter 19: Tobias**

IT IS DONE.

And without warning—without even the tiniest physical sensation—I was back.

No burning Yeerk pool. No strange, elfish god. No laser beams hovering at the back of my little brother’s head. Just a small, ordinary-looking office, with a single, tidy desk and a window with a distant view of the Potomac river.

I glanced down at my blue Andalite hands—glanced down with my stalk eyes while my main eyes stayed forward, watched my ten slim fingers curl into fists as my double thumbs folded over them. Five seconds ago, those hands had been human, the knuckles swollen and bleeding where they’d smashed into Jake’s face.

In front of me, the man behind the desk—Jeremiah Poznanski, a mid-level operative at the Department of Homeland Security—was scribbling furiously on a notepad, just as I’d told him to do. I’d said it was to prevent his half of the conversation from being recorded, and he’d given absolutely nothing away as he nodded, knowing full well that there was a camera watching from each corner of the room.

— _priority to establish a core of known-clean operatives, start securing area. 100+ high-value targets in perimeter (SS, exec, legis, CIA, FBI, NSA, Penta, my superiors, four billionaires, eight CEOs, lobbyists, journalists). Once we have core, can send team to investigate Ventura. Confirm no way to ID compromised from outside? No giveaways?_

I couldn’t help it. I began to laugh, my morphed body translating the impulse into a sort of staccato stomping as my tail curled and quivered.

In front of me, Jeremiah stopped writing—frowned—jotted a single line off in the margin of the page.

_Something wrong?_

My thoughts were—sliding. Like a giant stack of magazines, or a mud-covered hillside, gradually picking up momentum as my mind began to unravel.

_Sir? Elfangor?_

I ignored him, ignored his tiny little paper, his silly little scratchings, sank to the floor and continued to shake, wild laughter echoing silently—unsatisfyingly—in my head. I wanted a mouth. I wanted a mouth so I could howl. Without so much as a thought for the consequences, I began to demorph.

It was just too funny, you know? The seven of us, trying so hard, trying—ha— _our best_ —hanging on by our fingertips, scrambling for every inch, every tiny scrap of intel or advantage, and the whole time— _the whole time_ —the whole thing—just a game, just pawns—alien warlords who could wipe entire cities off the map—insane chess gods with crazy time powers—and Garrett and I could turn into birds, and we thought that would _matter_ , I thought it was enough to keep us safe—and now suddenly I was _back_ , back here with this Washington spook, and the things I’d told him so far were a house of cards, it was all puppetry, I’d told him just what we _wanted_ him to know, like I could somehow _stay in control_ —

In front of me, Jeremiah was on his feet, frozen with indecision, his pen and paper forgotten. I saw his eyes twitch toward his desk drawer—the drawer where he kept his issue sidearm, a loaded Beretta M9 with the safety off—and I laughed harder, wheezing huffs emerging from the gash in my face as my mouth appeared, as my skin crawled backwards to merge with my half-human trachea.

I’d been so _careful._ So many houses, so many people—digging through minds, dodging security systems, always morphing with one of Ax’s shredders in my hands. Thirty Controllers—that was our best guess, based on the tiny bit of data from Ax’s planetwide scan, back when we’d first woken him up. There were maybe thirty Controllers scattered across Washington, and I’d been doing everything I could to avoid attracting their attention, to find out who and where they were without giving anything away. I must have acquired and morphed a hundred different people over the past week, sneaking in and out of bedrooms, stunning people in their sleep. Jeremiah Poznanski’s son slept with an open window. Jeremiah Poznanski slept alone in a king size bed since his wife left last year.

Jeremiah Poznanski wasn’t a Controller. None of them were. Visser Three was dropping asteroids, and I was sneaking around on tiptoe.

I squeezed my eyes shut—just the two of them, as the stalks shriveled and shrank and vanished under my hair—squeezed them shut as tears began to leak out.

<Investigate the city,> I’d told him—not even five minutes ago, before being snatched away by whatever-the-fuck that little Keebler god had been. I’d told him about the YMCA, the hospital, the high school. Told him about the valley. The Gardens. The Bug fighters hovering over Jake and Rachel and Marco’s houses. Told him to use satellites for surveillance—to investigate the people who should’ve already been doing that surveillance, to see if they’d been taken.

Because I’d assumed the city would still _be_ there.

Because I’d assumed that things made sense—that even in a world with secret alien invasions and teenagers with morphing technology, there were some things that just _didn’t happen_ , cities didn’t just _disappear_ because it was _more convenient that way._

We were not ready for Visser Three.

And if we weren’t ready for Visser Three, I didn’t even _know_ what we weren’t, with regards to whatever Crayak and Ellimist were up to.

So I laughed. Laughed as my human body finished emerging, clothes and bookbag and all—laughed as I pushed myself up to my feet, laughed as the shredder grew out of my palm and I leveled it at Jeremiah Poznanski, making him swallow visibly.

_Hands flat on desk, didn’t even go for his gun, willing to die rather than risk pissing off the nice alien visitor, what a patriot—_

I thought about Garrett, frozen in time, his death a mere heartbeat away, and I laughed.

I thought about Cassie, who even now would be in a race for her life—unless the whole thing had been a prank, a troll, one giant fucking intergalactic lie—and I laughed.

I thought about Louis, and Fletcher, and Johnny, and all the other kids from Oak Landing, who would all be dead in thirty minutes. I thought about Jake, and Rachel, and Marco, who would not—unless they would—and I cackled madly, my whole body shaking.

 _So this is what a nervous breakdown feels like,_ a part of me whispered.

My thoughts were swirling, my brain off-kilter. Like the time I’d thought the magic Rice Krispies treats weren’t doing anything, so I’d gone ahead and eaten four more.

In front of me, Jeremiah’s paralysis had finally broken, and he reached for the phone on his desk. I didn’t bother to stop him, just laughed harder, wheezing. The phone wasn’t connected to anything; I’d made sure of that before ever setting foot in his office.

“Elfangor—” he began, his voice quiet—hesitant—unsure.

“Elfangor’s _dead_ ,” I managed to choke out, and the look on Jeremiah’s face triggered another wave of hysterical giggles.

“What—”

“Fuck it,” I said, dropping heavily into the chair in front of the desk. For a single, split second, a tiny voice inside of me shouted that maybe—just maybe—the meteor strike would buy us some cover, that maybe Visser Three would assume he’d killed all of us, as long as I didn’t give us away here in D.C.

But that just made me crack up again. _Clever little boy, clever plans, so tricksy, that’s cute._ “Fuck it,” I repeated, barely managing to hold the shredder steady. “Fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck that fuck me fuck you fuck everything fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—” and then I laughed some more because it sounded just like the song that Zach had showed me in the library, that got us kicked out, the guy with the bad teeth and the weird afro—

“Are you—” Jeremiah began, before breaking off to swallow again. “Are you going to kill me?”

_He’s really handling himself quite well, all things considered. Not everyday you come back from your bathroom break to find an alien waiting to tell you about a bodysnatcher invasion before transforming into a crazy teenager with a blaster. I should tell his boss to give him a raise._

“How’s fifty an hour sound?” I wheezed.

Slowly, smoothly, keeping his eyes on me the whole time, Jeremiah leaned back, began to reach toward his desk drawer. I watched impassively, still laughing, as he slid it open—watched as he glanced down—as he did a no-shit real-life double take, a look of horror and disbelief settling onto his face.

“Looking for this?” I asked, reaching into my bookbag with my free hand, drawing out the gun. I grinned involuntarily—it was just so _funny_ to see him there, to see that he didn’t know what was going on, had no idea how to respond, so lost, so scared, no script, no plan, didn’t know, didn’t know, didn’t know—

_Tobias! Pull it together, man!_

Why, though? Having it together was not going to matter. Having it together was not going to help me deal with Darth Vader chucking asteroids around, or Q turning everybody into puppets.

_This is serious! Garrett—_

Was either alive or dead, had already alived or died, and there was nothing, absolutely no thing at all that I could do about it.

_—would fucking slap you in the face for giving up right now._

But that was because he was a naïve little kid, because _I_ had protected him, sheltered him, stopped him from having to face the cruelty, the utter insanity of everything that was now impossible to ignore, if I was a better friend I wouldn’t have lied to him, would have just told him when I saw his birth parents at the mall with their eight-year-old daughter, so rich and clean and happy—

Jeremiah cleared his throat. “What—” he said, and then faltered. “I don’t—can you tell me what—just happened? What’s going on?”

_Why did you suddenly lose your fucking mind, kid?_

“I’ve just received a transmission from the mothership,” I said, my voice still shaky with laughter. “No point investigating Ventura county—Visser Three is taking a mulligan.”

“What?”

“There’s an asteroid coming. Garrett blew up the pool, and they’re all going to starve, so Visser Three’s starting over because dealing with a bunch of starving headaches—”

_Tobias! Come on!_

“—he’s got twelve more ships coming in like five months, so why bother—”

“Stop,” Jeremiah cut in, his voice tense. “Wait. Do you want—I mean, should we be talking out—”

“That was a lie,” I broke in. “I know you’ve got cameras and bugs everywhere and your agents and the fifth floor, I was trying to make you think I didn’t know everything, Jeremiah Poznanski who used to eat five boxes of Lucky Charms a week, who got blackout drunk and beat his kid, you should feel in control so you can relax because I’m not dangerous.”

I felt my lips twitch at the words _in control,_ but I held it together—barely.

Jeremiah no longer looked even remotely composed. His eyes were darting back and forth—from the door, to the pair of guns I was holding, to me, to the papers on his desk. He was starting to sweat, and I could see a tremor in his jaw.

 _Good. Now he fucking knows how_ I _feel._

“What do you mean, an asteroid?” he asked finally.

I could feel the laughter creeping in around the edges, the wild hysteria that I was just barely keeping at bay. There was a part of me that was horrified, watching the whole train wreck as it unfolded in slow motion—the dropping of the mask, the ruin of all my careful planning and maneuvering—but the rest of me just couldn’t find a reason to care.

_Fuck it. Just tell him straight._

“We’ve been trying to find a way into the pool,” I said, fighting valiantly to hold my voice steady. “Blow it up, cut off their food supply, starve them out. Looks like we succeeded, maybe half an hour ago. But Visser Three was one step ahead of us. He had a cloaked asteroid waiting behind the moon, and he’s launched it. It’s going to hit right on top of the YMCA. There won’t be anything left—not the pool, not the hospital, not the whole goddamn city. It’ll leave a ten-mile crater in the middle of Ventura county. He’s going to kill all of them. Everybody.”

I could feel the mudslide slowing, feel my brain slowly stitching itself back together. It was like swimming up from the bottom of a deep pool—for the first time, I noticed that the arm holding the shredder was trembling, felt the sweat that was trickling down the back of my neck. I felt weak—loose—like I was recovering from the flu.

“When?” Jeremiah asked tightly.

“About thi—twenty five minutes,” I said, feeling my Joker grin shrink a little further. A small voice in the back of my head had begun to moan— _oh, God, what have you done, he’s seen your_ face _—_

Jeremiah started to stand. “We have to—”

“No,” I interrupted, raising the shredder half an inch. “Think.”

He froze, and we locked eyes. Another voice arose in the back of my head, this one sounding an awful lot like Marco— _come on, don’t do the stupid cliché grownup thing, please be_ actually _smart—_

“Right,” he said, settling back into his chair. A shadow passed over his face, and I relaxed my elbow a little. “Right. Okay. We—”

He trailed off, scrubbed at his forehead, and looked over at me again. “Right,” he repeated.

There was a long pause.

“You aren’t actually an alien, are you?” he asked quietly. “You have access to one. But you’re human.”

I said nothing—just continued to hold his gaze.

“You’re scared,” he said. “Of the people they’ve taken here in D.C.”

“And in New York, Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Seoul, Jakarta, Delhi, Beijing, Moscow, Istanbul, São Paulo, and London,” I said, rattling off the list Marco and I had put together from Ax’s map. I was _not_ about to try to explain Crayak and Ellimist on top of everything else. “If they have a hundred Controllers in each—”

“Do they?” he asked.

“No. I don’t think so. Maybe thirty.”

“How are they managing it? Without pools, I mean. You said every three days—”

“We thought about that. Some of them could be flying back and forth to California, but it wouldn’t make sense for them all to do that, especially important ones—”

“Like the President.”

“Right. They could maybe just be killing their way through hosts and Yeerks, if they had to, or they could be getting Kandrona some other way—like, concentrating it down from the pool, and getting it through an injection or a pill. That can’t be easy, though, or they’d do it all the time. Best guess is, they’re cycling Yeerks in and out of stasis—”

“What?”

I hesitated for a moment. I could still feel mud and fog clogging up my thoughts, still sense manic laughter lurking just around the corner. I was shaken, confused—in no state to be making important strategic decisions. The plan had been to tell Jeremiah almost everything, but in my disguise as Elfangor, not as a human teenager who could be intimidated, marginalized, dismissed.

_So what? Either way, he’s going to do what he’s going to do._

But in the original version, I would still have been able to call some of the shots—

 _You just saw how much of a difference_ that _makes._

I sucked in a breath. Five months. We had five months to prepare for the second round of Visser Three’s invasion. Five months during which he might drop asteroids, kidnap heads-of-state, send cloaked and shielded Bug fighters to vaporize population centers. We’d bought ourselves some breathing room, but the Yeerks still held the high ground. The second they thought we were gaining the upper hand, they’d decimate the Earth’s population.

How much of that did Jeremiah understand? He was an intelligence agent, after all—it was his job to understand strategy. In the abstract, he’d probably do a better job of it than I would—

_—especially given that you just fell apart at the seams five minutes ago._

It all boiled down to a question of _who._ Who had Visser Three ordered taken? Who was watching? Who could I trust? Who did we need on our team, to start getting the Earth ready for the next round?

I didn’t have the answers. Jeremiah Poznanski of the Department of Homeland Security, though—

He probably didn’t have them either, but he knew where to _look._ That’s why I’d chosen him in the first place. He was the first link in the chain, the first step in a bootstrapping process to get me connected with the people who actually mattered.

_—what do you mean, actually mattered, none of us actually matter, this whole thing is a fucking joke, it’s a game—_

The voice was still there, but it was no longer the loudest thing in my head—no longer able to lever the rest of me into hysteria and despair. A memory of Garrett floated up in response—my own words, but they no longer felt like they belonged to me.

_—and if we can’t, we’ll just do the next thing, and the next, and the next. We’ll keep on trying until we figure out a way._

I lowered the shredder, watching to see how Jeremiah would react. His shoulders dropped half an inch, but otherwise he remained motionless, waiting.

Reaching into my bag, I drew out one of the stasis cylinders we’d stolen after Jake woke up. I leaned forward and set it on the desk.

“That’s a Yeerk,” I said, and Jeremiah’s eyes widened fractionally. “Inside. It’s in stasis; I don’t know how. Controllers carry these for emergencies, in case somebody figures them out and they have to do a quick infestation. Stun somebody, put the canister up to their ear, push that button—”

I trailed off. Jeremiah nodded tightly. Reaching out for the cylinder, he paused. “Is it dangerous?” he asked. “Fragile?”

I shook my head, and he picked it up. “You can analyze that all you want,” I said. “Bring the Yeerk out, study it. Maybe even infest somebody, see if you can develop a way to detect Controllers from the outside. But whatever you do, the Yeerk’s got only three days, unfrozen, before it starves.”

Jeremiah held the cylinder up at eye level, looking closely at the construction, the controls. “So if you had, say, ten of these—”

“—then you could keep somebody Controlled for a month, yeah. Swap in, swap out. That’s what we figured. It’s not going to be easy—there are probably some issues with changing Yeerks every time, and you’d have to arrange to keep the host body secured during the transition—”

“—but it’s a hell of a lot easier than flying the President out to California every three days.” Jeremiah set the cylinder down, looking grim. “What else can you give me? That weapon, for example—do you have a spare we could send to the lab, to start reverse engineering?”

I felt the beginnings of another crazy laugh, and squashed them mercilessly. _Not now, dammit._ Raising the shredder again, I popped the catch to release the charge canister and set both of them on his desk. Reaching into the bag, I drew out one of Ax’s spare earplugs—he’d given me eleven once he realized we didn’t have similar technology of our own, having used up three on something he didn’t want to talk about—and explained what it was for.

“We should also probably consider telling _someone_ about the meteor strike,” he said cautiously. “Someone who isn’t in one of those cities—someone in a position to record what happens, who we’ll have an easier time convincing and recruiting later if we’ve already proven ourselves by predicting this in advance.”

“Do you know who that might be?” I asked, glancing at the clock on the wall. “Because there’s not much more than twenty minutes left.”

He bit his lip. “Maybe.” He glanced down at the shredder, then back up at me. “Depends on whether or not you’re going to lift whatever block you have on my phone.”

I stared right back. “Depends on whether you’re going to stop trying to fuck me over,” I said flatly.

There was another long pause.

“So you were lying,” Jeremiah said softly. “You _can_ read minds.”

I said nothing. It wasn’t _quite_ mind-reading, after all—I’d dug through Jeremiah’s thoughts and memories hours ago, while morphed into his body, but that didn’t mean I had anything like the ability to predict what he was thinking on the spot.

“Section two, subsection three,” I said, and he winced.

You had to give Homeland Security some credit. They had _actual procedure_ for interacting with extraterrestrial visitors, all laid out in a huge, branching decision tree that ranged from friendly to hostile, alone to en masse, English-speaking to incomprehensible, carrying tech or not—every possibility I could have come up with and more. Section two, subsection three dealt with gullible, vulnerable, isolated aliens, who could potentially be tricked or trapped or forced to give up valuable technology.

Jeremiah might believe me about the Yeerks. There was no way to be absolutely sure, but he certainly _seemed_ to be taking the threat seriously. But he’d _also_ been stringing me along, keeping me talking, trying to give his colleagues a chance to set up a net in the hallway, the adjacent offices, the floor below, and the roof. There was a pressure pad beneath the carpet, near the corner of his desk, and he’d triggered it almost as soon as I’d made my presence known.

“They’re not coming,” I said, looking pointedly at the slightly discolored spot on the carpet. “The second you walked into the room, we froze every channel of communication in and out. No radio, no light, no electromagnetic signals of any kind. The track they’ve got on your heartrate monitor has been watching a loop for as long as you’ve been sitting here. There’ve been two phone calls and three instant messages, and as far as anybody outside this room can tell, you’ve answered all of them normally. I’m not an idiot, Agent Poznanski.”

To his credit, Jeremiah didn’t try to deny it, didn’t get flustered. Without the slightest change in his facial expression, he opened his mouth and shouted. “ _Fire!”_ he called out, his eyes flickering toward the door. _“Fire in Poznanski’s office! Help!”_

I didn’t move. Together, we waited—ten seconds, twenty. Finally, he shrugged.

“The procedure exists for a reason,” he said simply. “It’s easier to fool a single agent than to fool the whole department. It’s exactly because of threats like your Yeerks that we want as many eyes on a given situation as possible, as soon as possible.”

“You can’t risk it,” I said. “You can’t trust your department. I cleared Stevenson, Ramos, Butler, and Wyle on my way up to you, but even they might have been taken in the last day or so. Visser Three took out a whole county—including ten thousand of his own people—just because of a _risk_ of exposure.”

“Does he know about you?”

I paused.

 _Stupid clever boy, things aren’t for_ sense.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t know why we’re different.” _Other than the god that says we are._ “Maybe because we already had a chance to go public, and we didn’t. Maybe he doesn’t care about a small resistance, for some reason. But he’s not fucking around when it comes to the whole planet. If we start alerting the general population and he catches wind of it—the only thing keeping him from glassing every major city on the planet is that _he_ doesn’t want to.”

“We have to start _somewhere._ ”

“Yeah—somewhere outside Washington. Not with the people in this building. Agents in the field, agents in other cities—not New York or Silicon Valley, either—people who haven’t been anywhere near infested areas for at least two months.”

“Then why are _you_ here? Why are you talking to me at all?”

“Because if they have the President, we have to get her back. Two birds, one stone. Someone like you can help get both balls rolling.”

He frowned. “Look. You haven’t given me any _proof_ yet, okay? I mean—sure, yes, you’ve proven that you have telepathic abilities, that you’ve got transformational powers and a body that _looks_ alien, that you’ve got a couple of shiny things that are plausibly unknown technology—if they’re not just movie props—and that you can shut down communications from my office. All of that means you’re somebody _interesting,_ but it doesn’t mean there’s a secret alien invasion going on. I _have_ to maintain some skepticism—for all I know, these Yeerks are the good guys, and you’re doing some kind of preemptive counter-counter-insurgency.”

“The asteroid—”

“ _Hasn’t happened yet._ And even if it does, what’s to say that wasn’t _your_ team? All I’ve got to go on is your word, and for Christ’s sake—you just had what sure looked to _me_ like a meltdown five minutes ago. You aren’t exactly inspiring confidence, here.”

I clamped down on my knee-jerk response, forced myself to stop and think. “You’re right,” I said. “Okay? I admit it—you’re right. But look—you can see that it makes sense to be cautious, right? At least for now? I mean, if I _am_ telling the truth—”

“There’s still a chain of command. I have to go to _somebody_ —I have resources only to the extent that I play by the rules. If you want me to start investigating the rest of the department—if you want me to get these artifacts to somebody who can start to understand them—then I can’t just go rogue.”

“Who do you need? I can clear a couple of people, if you tell me who they are and where to find them.”

“See, that’s exactly what I’m _not_ going to do, is tell you the names and locations of important targets in the Department of Homeland Security.”

I gave myself a mental kick. _Just drag it out of him in morph later._ “Point. More generally, then. Who would you go to if you thought _everyone_ in the building had been compromised?”

“I’d go to the NSA, or the CIA, or the FBI, or the Pentagon—they’re all right around the corner. Which, by the way, is _another_ element that makes your whole story more than a little difficult to believe. Seems to me that if this Visser Three is as competent as you’re making him out to be, he would have either set up shop right here in Washington, or gone to some tiny village somewhere with no internet where he didn’t have to worry about anybody noticing what was going on. What’s the thinking behind taking some random midsize city in California?”

I gritted my teeth. The conversation was spiraling out of control, and once again, I felt an almost irresistible impulse to laugh. At this point, it would almost be easier to just kill him and start over—but I couldn’t do that, either, because of how _clever_ I’d been in setting up the whole conversation.

I glanced over toward the corner of the room—at the closed door, the empty carpet, the unobstructed wall.

“Who would you go to if you couldn’t trust _anyone_ in Washington?” I asked, doing my best imitation of patience. “If this were one of those spy movie type situations?”

“DHS branch office in Chicago or Houston.”

“And if you couldn’t go to DHS at all?”

“I don’t have some magical ‘contact’ that lives ‘off the grid,’ if that’s what you’re asking. I know a couple of people at West Point, and I know at least one person at Los Alamos and another at DARPA. Might be able to get something done at Bell Labs, too, at least with the artifacts—my ID should open a few doors there. And if I’m just pulling rank, I could probably do a lot with a National Guard unit. They’re generally pretty friendly to DHS.”

“You got a way to send secure email?”

Jeremiah scoffed.

“I mean secure from your boss, too.”

“Yes.”

I looked at the clock. Fifteen minutes, give or take. “Okay. Those people, and only those people. A meteor’s about to hit Ventura county, you’ve got an extremely delicate situation you might need help with, they shouldn’t tell anybody, you’ll be in touch. Nothing else. Sound fair?”

Jeremiah had already opened his computer and was typing furiously.

“Rictic,” I said. “Check the messages before you let them through.”

Jeremiah glanced up at me and frowned, but said nothing. Fifteen seconds later, he finished, spinning the laptop around to show me the screen. “Want to rephrase them, so I can’t send any secret codes?” he asked, a note of sarcasm in his tone.

“Rictic,” I repeated. The screen flickered, the words rearranging themselves, and I nodded. Puzzled, Jeremiah turned the computer back around and then blanched, the blood draining from his face as he realized what had happened.

“You can click ‘send,’” I said.

He did, looking faintly nauseated, and then closed his computer. “So,” he said, his voice just a little too loud and indifferent. “That’s done. Now what?”

I pointed toward the stasis cylinder, earplug, shredder, and charge canister. “Can you actually get those things out of the building, without security noticing?”

His mouth twisted. “If I say yes, will you believe me?”

“No.”

“Then why are you asking?”

I couldn’t help it. I grinned, a faint memory of Jake drifting up from the ancient past of a few weeks ago. “Because you might say no,” I answered.

“No, I can’t. They check everything, in and out.”

Nodding again, I reached forward to scoop the items into my bookbag, pausing as the lingering thought of Jake drew my gaze toward my knuckles. They were smooth and undamaged, with no trace of the beating I’d given the other boy.

 _The_ least _important thing for you to be confused about._

“Then it’s up to you, I guess,” I said. “I’ve given you all the information I can. You know about Ventura. You know about the Yeerks. You know about thought-speak and the morphing power. If it turns out I can trust you—if you don’t do anything stupid while all of this is blowing up—then I’ll visit you at your house, and give these back. The sooner we can get human labs manufacturing this stuff, the better.”

It was—as Marco would have put it—insane. It would’ve been one thing to trust this guy after speaking to him as Elfangor, being one step ahead of him the whole time, giving him no reason to worry or doubt. It was a whole different thing, letting him go under these circumstances. He’d seen my face—seen me crack up and break down—been in control of the conversation more than half the time. If I’d left any lasting impression of my personality, it was as an unstable teenager with a gun, not as the aloof, genius alien I’d intended to be. I’d given up a lot of ground.

But there were gods, and asteroids, and even though I’d walked back at least a little bit from my brush with hysteria, the idea of _sure and safe_ still largely seemed ridiculous. There was only so much to be gained from caution and cleverness—we had as little as five months to get ready before the rest of the fleet showed up, and it was time to start doing things Rachel’s way. Jeremiah Poznanski wasn’t the perfect ally, but he was what I had. That would either be enough, or it wouldn’t.

“What about you?” he asked.

_Find Garrett._

“There are still thirty Controllers somewhere in Washington,” I said reluctantly. “Maybe the President, maybe the Pentagon, maybe one of those billionaires you mentioned. I’m going to keep looking.”

Jeremiah grimaced, seeming to struggle for a moment. “How are you—I mean, how do you plan to—get close?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been doing okay so far just sneaking into people’s houses. I’ve been trading up—that’s how I found you.”

His grimace deepened. “Paul Evans,” he said finally. “Secret Service.” He scribbled a few lines on a post-it note, held it out to me. “I don’t _know_ him, exactly—not enough to tell you when his birthday is. But we had a few drinks together, after my wife left. If you catch him off-duty, my name should be enough to get him to stop and listen. That’s where I’d start—where I _will_ start, if you want my help.”

Reaching out, I took the note. It seemed impolite to mention that I already knew all of that—that Paul Evans was a name I’d dragged from Poznanski Prime’s brain earlier that morning. “Thanks,” I said, dropping the note into my bag. “I’ll take it from here—you’re more valuable pulling strings inside the DHS.”

Standing, I shrugged the bookbag onto my shoulders.

“Where are you—how are you—”

“Window,” I said, and began to morph.

It was a test, but not much of one. If Jeremiah made any sort of violent move toward me, Rictic the Chee—currently poised invisibly in the corner by the door, where he’d been standing the whole time, keeping us shielded behind a comm blackout and a hologram—would stop him in his tracks. And if he tried to trap me, refused to let me go—

Well. Once Rictic let me out—I knew where he lived. Knew where his son went to school. It wouldn’t be too hard to get the robot to go run some small errand while I cleaned up loose ends.

_Clever boy, clever plans._

_The type of people who do the right thing._

_Did you really think_ you _were the main character of this story?_

I shook my head, trying to set aside the voices as I continued to shrink toward the floor. I would have been more certain to avoid notice in fly morph, but I didn’t much like the idea of trying to find a safe demorphing zone as a fly, not to mention the fact that Jeremiah didn’t need to be grossed out any more than he already was. I knew from experience that it was hard enough watching someone change into a bird.

“That technology,” he said suddenly, a thoughtful note creeping into his voice. “Morphing. If you _are_ human—they gave it to you? It isn’t species-specific?”

I tried to laugh, but my voice box had already disappeared, my lips protruding and hardening as my teeth dissolved into nothing. Ten seconds—I’d been _ten seconds_ away from making the suggestion when I’d been snatched away by the time lord. It would have been the very next words out of my—well, the next thoughts out of my head, if the whole thing hadn’t gone sideways.

<Yes,> I said, as my skin shattered into feathers and my arms flattened into wings. <And I can give it to others, too. _Will_ give it, as soon as I find people I can trust. >

I expected him to say more, but he was silent for the rest of the morph. Silent as I shrank down to barely ten inches long, silent as he opened the window for me, silent as I darted out into the warm afternoon sun, leaving Rictic to keep an eye on him.

I knew how he felt. I didn’t know what to say, either.

 

*        *        *

 

What do you do, five minutes before a disaster you have no way to prevent?

Tobias from an hour ago would have been darting toward the White House, or the Capitol building, hoping to catch the reactions of important people, to eavesdrop on sensitive conversations. He would’ve been motivated, energized—focused on the possibility that his efforts might make a difference.

I didn’t feel _completely_ helpless. But I was a whole lot less confident than I had been that morning.

I drifted aimlessly across the city, catching the columns of warm air rising off the grass and letting them carry me up and up and up. In a minute, I was level with the peak of the Washington monument, some five miles away; with my hawk vision, I thought I could just barely make out figures moving behind the windows of the observation deck. Two minutes after that, and I was high enough that I could no longer hear any sound except the roar of the occasional passing jet.

 _Now?_ a part of my brain kept asking.

I kept rising as _no_ became _maybe_ , _maybe_ became _probably_ , and _probably_ became _definitely._ I watched the tiny blobs of cars and trucks and people, waiting for—

What?

I’m not sure what I imagined. Maybe that all of the cars would stop, that all of the people would gather around shops and bars, peering at the TVs. Maybe that the Earth would shake, or there would be a flash of light and a thunderclap.

 _Something_ , you know?

But there was nothing. If it was going to happen, it had already happened, and down below, the slow crawl of life just—kept going.

There was a part of me that wanted to strike out west, to switch from hawk to snipe and power across the continent, to find Garrett and touch him and look into his eyes and talk to him and _know_ that he was alive, that it had either all been some crazy dream or that the careless god had kept his word.

It wasn’t the right thing to do, though. It wasn’t the right thing, which meant I couldn’t do it, no matter how much I wanted to, because I was still Garrett’s number one reason to believe that the right thing was something that actually mattered. It wasn’t funny anymore, like it had been back in Jeremiah’s office—just sad and heavy and confusing.

If I wanted to give up, and didn’t—if I kept hanging on just so someone _else_ wouldn’t give up, even though I thought giving up was probably the right move, even for them—

What should you do, when nothing you _could_ do can possibly make a difference?

_Even if it’s hard. We’ll keep on trying until we figure out a way._

Stupid kid. I could’ve _killed_ Jake, if it wasn’t for the fact it was my own damn fault.

I wheeled in a lazy circle, tracing the curve of the horizon with the tip of my wing, trying to think, to understand, to decide.

I could go to the White House, where the President—probably—would make some kind of emergency speech.

I could go to Silver Spring, where Paul Evans lived, and try to acquire him, to see if there was an alien slug living in his brain.

I could go back to Jeremiah’s house, and try to slip inside when his son came home from school.

I could admit it didn’t matter, and go nowhere.

 _Is this what they_ want _me to do? Elfangor’s gods? Are they hoping I’ll spin around in circles, accomplishing nothing?_

If I’d had a human face, I would have scowled. There was no point in _that_ kind of thinking. Either everything was predetermined, in which case who cared, or I still had freedom of choice, so it didn’t matter. The only thing that had changed was that now I was _aware_ of the larger game, where before I’d just been oblivious.

_Elfangor knew, though—didn’t he? He’d encountered them before—Crayak, or Ellimist, or both. That’s what he meant when he said we were on the widest path to victory._

Only that was bullshit—wasn’t it? Elfangor hadn’t thought the way to win was to _save_ us. He’d come to burn the planet to a crisp. In fact—

_Probably the whole reason his weapon didn’t work is that one of them interfered._

I shivered, shedding altitude. If you looked at it _that_ way—

How many of the things that had happened to us hadn’t just _happened?_ How many of them had been _done_ to us? The Chapmans—Cassie’s parents—Jake, nearly getting eaten alive.

Jake, getting _saved._ Coming back, practically from the dead, through what seemed—in retrospect—like an awfully big coincidence.

_Shit—the whale._

Suddenly, I understood what it was like to be religious. _Really_ religious, like the kind of people who said things like “God works in mysterious ways” or “God helps those who help themselves.” For the first time in my life, it seemed possible that there really were no such things as coincidences.

It left me feeling very, very small.

_Just—be alive, okay, Garrett?_

_Please._

I circled aimlessly for a few more minutes, climbing up until my breath began to mist and half the clouds were underneath me.

 _Okay, fine. You do matter, you don’t matter—whatever. You have to do_ something. _You can’t just fly in circles forever._

Marco and Jake had sent me to get the President. As a distant second, to try to do some recruiting, or start a second resistance movement. But the President was the obvious target, the most important pawn. More than anything else, I needed to know if the Yeerks already had her.

And for that, I needed to get close—close enough to touch her in my own, human form.

Straightening out, I pointed my nose north and down, beginning the long, straight glide toward Silver Spring. Paul Evans, at 4240 Highwood Place.

I would try not to do anything clever.

 

*        *        *

 

Maybe I’d been doing it wrong for weeks, and I should’ve just been looking for Paul Evans from the very beginning. Or maybe I’d been doing it right all along, and getting to him—without having to go through any Controllers—was the payoff I’d been working for.

Either way, Paul Evans was the perfect ally.

I don’t know much about the Secret Service. Just what everybody knows, really—that they’re the one agency that’s never had a traitor, and that they jump in front of the President whenever bullets start flying.

But those two things say a _lot_ , when you really think about them. People talk about patriots, but it’s a whole other thing when you’re actually ready to lay down your life for your country. Not to save your buddies in the foxhole, not to take down Adolf Hitler, not in heroic response to a sudden emergency, but just because you’ve volunteered to be the one they call, if they need someone to die.

I was waiting on his doorstep when he came home—late, at three in the morning, thanks to all the chaos from the meteor strike. I told him Jeremiah Poznanski sent me, that there was a threat to the President, and that I needed to talk to him about it, alone. He called one of his buddies to check on him in three hours, and then escorted me into his living room.

No hesitation. No fear. No questions. It wasn’t the sort of thing I could have done—or Marco, for that matter. For me, there was always a balancing act, always a dozen different things to juggle, and rule number one was _protect yourself._

But Paul Evans wasn’t trying to protect himself. He had exactly one priority, and if hearing what I had to say meant exposing himself to danger, that was just the way things were. It was the sort of job I could see Jake growing up to have, or—oddly enough—Cassie.

“All right,” he said, settling himself into the armchair across from me. He stayed upright, not leaning back, his elbows resting on his knees. “What’s this about?”

I took a deep breath. I was alone—Rictic was still off keeping an eye on Jeremiah, and while he’d said he could be there fast if I called him, I didn’t know what good he would be in a fight, given his blocks against violence. I was wearing my morph armor—which, as far as I knew, the Yeerks were still in the dark about—but other than that, I was on my own. The odds were fifty to one against Paul Evans being a Controller, but if he was—

 _You’re already not in control,_ I thought. _Don’t ever forget that._

And then—quieter—Garrett’s voice—

_Not afraid._

I looked straight into Paul Evans’ eyes, tuning into him with every scrap of attention I could muster, every ounce of instinct I’d picked up off the street. “Andalite,” I said, looking for a twitch, a tightening, a change in the size of his pupils. “Yeerk. Visser Three.”

Nothing.

I exhaled, long and slow. “Those words mean anything to you?” I asked.

The answer would have been _no_ in either case, but I believed him. I was no Jake, but even a Yeerk couldn’t have control _that_ good.

“Um,” I said, suddenly feeling awkward. “Would you mind—uh—going and getting your sidearm?” He raised an eyebrow, and I shifted uncomfortably. “Maybe even pointing it—at me? I’m—um—probably some of this is going to make you really uncomfortable, and I’d sort of prefer that you felt—uh— _in control_.”

He said nothing for a long moment—just sort of looked at and through and all over me with a kind of Terminator gaze. “Are you carrying any weapons?” he asked quietly.

“Not yet. But—uh—it’s complicated. At some point, I—might be.” His expression tightened, and I hastened to clarify. “Not yours!” I added. “I just—”

He raised a hand, and I stopped talking, my jaw clicking shut. Pushing the armchair back a few feet, he stood and walked over to a cabinet next to the TV. He typed a four-digit number into a keypad by the handle, and with a _click,_ the door swung open. When he came back, he was holding a very large, very black handgun.

“Thanks,” I said as he sat back down, the gun pointed at the coffee table between us. I sucked in another deep breath. “I—okay, look, I’m going to say a bunch of things that are going to sound _really_ crazy, okay? And I kind of want you to give me the benefit of the doubt, so before I say any of them, I’d like to—sort of—prove that I’m not just some stupid kid? If you don’t mind?”

He tilted his head fractionally, but said nothing.

 _Here goes,_ I thought.

<John Evans,> I broadcast. <Secret Service, four-two-four-zero Highwood Place. No, you’re not going crazy, yes, this is coming from the kid in front of you. No, he can’t read minds. I, I mean. I can’t read minds. But I can think at you, and you’ll hear it. For instance, I’ve got a number between one and a hundred written down on a scrap of paper in my pocket. The number’s seventeen. Can I take it out?>

Score two for government agents either being really well trained or just being naturally cool under pressure. Paul Evans’ eyes widened when I first began thinking at him, and his knuckles whitened on the grip of his gun, but otherwise he didn’t react at all. Slowly, he nodded, and I reached toward my pocket with two fingers.

“What’s the number?” I asked aloud, just before drawing it out.

“Seventeen,” he said flatly.

I slid the scrap of paper across the coffee table toward him. He ignored it completely.

“We call it thought-speak,” I said. “Dumb name, I guess, but it’s shorter than saying ‘telepathy.’”

“We.”

His tone was still flat, the voice of a man who’s forcing himself to expect nothing, to be surprised by nothing. Professional.

“There’s more,” I said. “At some point in the next ninety seconds, a bookbag is going to sort of—ooze—out of my left hand, and a gun out of my right. Um. I’ll definitely keep the gun pointed away from you.”

I demorphed.

“What kind of weapon is that?” he asked, a hint of tension finally showing through his iron composure.

“Laser,” I said, morphing surreptitiously back into my armor inside my clothes, this time without incorporating the gun and the bookbag.

“Demonstrate,” he said.

I blinked. “What? How?”

“The floor. Next to the coffee table.”

“I—”

“Do it.”

Somehow, without seeming to actually move, his own gun had ended up pointed more or less directly at my chest. Swallowing, I turned the shredder toward the polished hardwood, and squeezed the trigger.

TSEWWWWW!

The flash faded, and we both blinked. The floor was undamaged—no gaping hole, no black scorch mark, nothing.

“It’s on stun,” I explained. “Mostly it just scrambles the nervous system. Can’t go around burning people—”

“Set it to maximum. Kill. Whatever. Some kind of reasonably high burn.”

I obeyed.

TSEWWWWW!

This time, the beam punched a ragged hole the size of my fist straight through the oak beams, filling the air with the smell of smoke and ozone.

“What’s in the bookbag?”

“It’s complicated,” I said, feeling my heart rate ease a little as my morph armor slid into place. Paul Evans didn’t seem like the kind of person who would shoot you on accident, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t shoot you, period. “I need to give you some context, first.”

“Weapon on the table.”

I nodded and complied, but slowly, making a bit of a production out of popping the charge canister and setting each of them carefully down on the glass. “I’m on your side,” I reminded him, and after a moment he gave a tight nod.

“My name is Tobias Yastek,” I began. “Y-A-S-T-E-K. If you check Social Security, you’ll see that I live—or I guess _used_ to live—in Ventura County, California. And no, that’s not a coincidence.”

It took nearly forty-five minutes, but I told him everything, leaving out only the Chee and Elfangor’s gods. The morphing tech. The YMCA. The high school and the hospital. Everybody’s families. Kandrona and the stasis cylinders. Ax, and the sensor readings that had led us to believe there were thirtyish Controllers somewhere in Washington.

I told him about accessing memories from a morph, and he insisted I demonstrate, so I put on the body of Jeremiah Poznanski and dredged up as much as I could of the conversations they’d had over scotch after Jeremiah’s wife left him.

And then I told him about the asteroid. I made it sound like Ax had some kind of early-warning system, and that’s how the rest of them had known to bail out. I told him about Visser Three, and our sense that the Yeerks were only holding off on wholesale destruction because they thought their quiet infiltration was working.

“And you think they have President Tyagi,” Paul said when I finally finished, his voice as cold as ice.

“I don’t know. We couldn’t figure out what they were going for, maintaining a presence in Washington. It can’t be easy, without a pool. On the one hand—yeah, you obviously want the President. But on the other hand, there’s a _lot_ of power held by people who’ve got a lot fewer eyes on them, right?”

“You said they starve out after three days?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure that hasn’t changed.”

He stood up and began pacing, his gun forgotten on the table. “How can you detect them from the outside?”

I shook my head. “It’s not easy. Right now, the only reliable way is for me to acquire them in their sleep and then morph into them.”

“You can read the Yeerk’s memories, too?”

“No, but there’s usually plenty of other stuff that gives it away. The whole being mindraped thing.”

“What else?” Paul asked.

“What?”

“What other methods of detection?”

“Oh. Um—dogs. One of our group has this theory you could train one of those cancer-sniffing dogs to detect them. And we haven’t actually tried an MRI, obviously, but Yeerks are pretty big, and there’s bound to be some weird activity going on that a brain scan would pick up.”

“You said you’re giving the spare Yeerk to Poznanski?”

“If he doesn’t do anything stupid in the meantime. He thinks one of his lab friends might be able to do something useful with it.”

“We can do better than that,” Paul muttered, but then he grimaced. “If they’ve taken President Tyagi, though, we’re going to have a hell of a time. There’s zero chance we can come up with a way to keep her incommunicado for three days, _especially_ since that means they’ll have her family and the White House staff and her current SS detachment at least.”

“Aren’t you—I mean, doesn’t that include—”

“I’m on Vice President Kehler.”

“Oh.” I paused as Paul continued to pace. “Anyway, I thought about that,” I continued, cautiously. “If we get eyes close enough, we could try to figure out when she’s feeding or switching Yeerks or whatever, and catch her near the end of the three day window, so there’s less of a wait. And we _could_ use morphing tech to cover for her, if we had to.”

We could also get Rictic or one of the other Chee to try impersonating her, but that was a lot riskier than having direct access to her memories and personality. Unfortunately, for Paul, that wasn’t a plus.

“Absolutely not,” he said, a hint of steel underlying the words. “You don’t even _begin_ to have the clearance it would take to have access to all the things she knows about, not to mention the fact that I’m not signing off on any plan that involves a stranger digging through her mind.”

“Even if there’s a Yeerk already doing that?” I argued. “Look—it doesn’t have to be me. It could be her husband, or the VP—hell, it could be _you_ , if it had to be.”

He froze mid-step. “Wait,” he said. “You have the blue box?”

“I told you, remember? My friend Garr—”

“No,” he interrupted. “I mean, _you_ have it? Here? It’s not back in California with the rest of your group?”

“Oh—no. I mean, yeah. Yes. I have it. Not _here_ here, but—yeah.”

“Why?”

“What?” I asked, taken aback by the sudden intensity in his tone.

“Why do you have it? What did you intend to do with it?”

“Recruit,” I said, somewhat bewildered. “I thought that was obvious.”

“So you’re not giving it up for study, too?”

There was a long, long pause, during which Paul fixed me with another one of those X-ray looks, and I chose my next words very carefully.

“No,” I said slowly. “I’m giving up the gun and the stasis tube and the Yeerk, because those bear directly on the war effort. If we manage to get our hands on a shield or a cloaking device, I’ll pass those along, too. But the cube is ours. It’s our number one advantage, and the second we give it up, we’re no longer able to keep it safe from the Yeerks. I’ll give individual people the ability to morph, but I’m not handing over the source.”

There was another, equally tense pause, and then Paul nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “What do I have to do to qualify?”

“To morph?”

“Yes.”

I bit my lip. _Okay,_ that _was fast._

Even though this was part of what I’d come to Washington to do—even though Paul Evans seemed like _exactly_ the kind of person we wanted on our side—it just didn’t quite feel right. Not like it had when I’d given the power to Garrett. Paul was a stranger, complete and total—I knew nothing about him except the memory of a few drinks and the impressions of the past hour. If I gave him the morphing power, I’d be leveling him up into one of the most dangerous people on the planet. He would be able to go anywhere, do almost anything, look inside the mind of any person he crossed paths with.

It was a lot to ask for, coming from somebody I didn’t even know.

_And yet—_

I looked up and into Paul’s eyes. He was so much older than me—a grownup, a soldier, a patriot. A man who’d let a teenage kid into his house in the middle of the night, because he had something to protect. Who’d listened, and watched, without batting an eye. Who was now asking me for a weapon, because he wanted to get into the fight.

_The type of people who do the right thing, even if it’s hard._

And then, another thought—another memory.

_For the time being, at least, the game revolves around you—your decisions, your fate._

It wasn’t the sort of thing Marco would do.

But then again, Jake hadn’t sent Marco. He’d sent me.

“Just one thing,” I said, finally, breaking the silence. “Hold out your hand, and let me acquire you.”

 

*        *        *

 

For the third time that day, I explained. About Elfangor, about Visser Three, about the war that had been brewing, that had started in earnest just a few hours earlier. I explained, and the most powerful person in the world listened.

On one level, I was astonished. My model of how government worked came from movies and TV, where the President never did anything without a room full of people putting their two cents in. I’d basically assumed it would be impossible to talk to her alone, and doubly impossible for her to make any unilateral decisions, without first consulting a dozen other bigwigs that Paul and I would have to clear.

But here we were, and it seemed to be working. The whole thing gave me a new appreciation for the Yeerks—their outlook, their whole way of doing things. For weeks, I’d been feeling my way around D.C. in the dark, getting nowhere, doing a slow burn through security guards and cops and low-level government spooks. And then I’d had one conversation with Jeremiah— _one conversation,_ and I’d leapfrogged straight from Paul Evans to the President of the United States. And now—

Now, humankind’s most advanced military was in the fight.

It was all about knowing the right people. Knowing them, or finding them—following the lines of connection, the web of relationships. It was the whole _six degrees of separation_ thing—you were never more than a few handshakes away from a billionaire, or an admiral, or a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

But by the same token, the Yeerks really needed only a handful of hosts to take over the world. Ninety-nine percent of Earth’s resources were owned by one percent of its population—it wasn’t literally true, but the metaphor was solid. How many countries were there, after all? How many _truly important_ companies? There were only so many presidents, so many CEOs. You could conquer the whole world, with a thousand Yeerks in the right heads—would pretty much already _have_ the world, no conquering needed. In six weeks, they’d basically taken over an entire city without anyone noticing. The only reason we hadn’t already lost is that they’d landed in Ventura County, instead of Washington or Beijing.

We’d gotten lucky. Or somebody had been pulling strings on our behalf. Either way, we couldn’t count on it the second time around. They’d be back—this time in strength—with all the knowledge that they’d culled from ten thousand human brains.

_Not in control, never in control._

<May Tobias demorph, Madam President? He’s carrying the artifacts with him.>

An indistinct vibration, long enough to be a single word. Then—

<Go ahead, Tobias.>

Picking my way across fibers as large as tree trunks, I climbed up toward the light, out of the roll in Paul’s pant cuff. Launching myself away from his ankle, I zipped out into the open and landed somewhere in the middle of the seemingly infinite carpet.

<Sorry,> I apologized, as I began to demorph. <This is going to be pretty gross.>

We’d entered the White House over an hour earlier, having first waited for the morphing tech to finish analyzing Paul’s two DNA samples—mine and his own—and for him to spend a few minutes in my body, confirming my story. We’d debated various possible configurations—Paul as himself and me as Jeremiah, me as Paul and Paul as something small, Paul in morph armor with me morphed away inside—before settling on Paul in morph armor and me as a housefly.

“That way, I can carry a second gun past security,” he’d reasoned. “Plus, it’ll be much easier for me to get a private conversation with her alone than if I’m with an unscheduled, uncleared guest with no ID.”

It also meant that our conversation had been weirdly disjointed, with President Tyagi speaking directly to Paul, who’d translated in thought-speak that both of us could hear, with me broadcasting to both of them in turn. It wasn’t _too_ bad, given that the President didn’t talk much—as an extra precaution, Paul had insisted that she limit herself to _yes, no,_ and questions written in code—but it meant that I’d been explaining blind, without being able to gauge her reactions or see what kind of impact I was having.

And now I was coming out of fly morph, of all things—a horrific mixture of human and bug the size of a toddler, swelling up from her carpet like some sort of cancerous balloon. Not the best of first impressions, though it still probably beat out the day I’d met Jake while upside-down inside of a toilet.

<About ninety seconds, Madam President.>

Another vibration.

<Yes, Madam President. Regardless of size.>

Slowly, my fly vision changed back to normal, the million tiny shattered views popping one by one, like tiny bubbles merging together. I could feel my wings folding back and fusing together, track the loss of sensation as part of them expanded into the bookbag. I was facedown on the carpet, and I rolled over, immediately regretting the decision as I caught a glimpse of the look on President Tyagi’s face.

<Sorry,> I repeated, my still-insectoid limbs twitching reflexively.

She grimaced, nodding curtly.

<It’s not always this bad,> I said. <And it doesn’t hurt, so there’s that.>

She nodded again, her gaze unwavering despite her obvious disgust.

<If she’s a Controller, she’s doing a good job of it,> I said privately, to Paul.

He didn’t answer.

We had discussed the possibility in his house, before leaving, and agreed it didn’t seem likely—even with a hundred Yeerks, they couldn’t cover the First Family and the White House staff and the Secret Service and all of the other people who came into contact with the President every day. The risk of discovery—especially if she had to carry a stunner or store spare Yeerks in stasis cylinders—was just too high.

Probably.

Which meant that—if we were lucky—the only thing we were up against right now was Murphy’s Law.

And if we were _un_ lucky—

Well. It was my job to get her out of there, one way or another. We didn’t have Rictic blocking communications—I’d thought about texting him, but there was no safe way to get him into the building, even with holograms—so we’d have to rely on Paul to hold the door long enough for me to fold her into a morph, if things went south. As a snipe, I could make it back to his house in under ten minutes; he’d left the back door open and a bunch of zipties, duct tape, and rope on the kitchen counter. None of the windows in the Oval Office opened, of course, and they were all bulletproof, but the shredder should be able to make a hole easily enough.

Thankfully, though, it didn’t look like it was going to come to that.

I climbed to my feet as the last of the changes rippled across my body, leaving me fully human. Paul and President Tyagi were sitting in two of the chairs in front of the huge, ornate desk, and I settled into a third, dropping the bookbag at my feet.

“Um,” I said reflexively, before Paul cut me off with a thought-speak hiss.

 _Of course the room is bugged,_ he’d scoffed, hours earlier. _You think they bug the Department of Homeland Security and NOT the White House?_

Leaning forward, President Tyagi extended her hand.

I glanced at Paul, whose eyes narrowed as he shook his head microscopically _no._

I swallowed. Looked back at the President, then back at Paul. Jerked my head, hoping he would figure it out, and explain.

<The acquiring process requires touch,> Paul reminded her. <Neither one of us will touch you without permission.>

President Tyagi rolled her eyes, reached for her pen and paper and scribbled a line of gibberish, which she flashed impatiently at Paul.

<She says you can shake her hand, and please—>

She snapped her wrist, flourishing the paper.

<She says you can shake her hand, dammit, and please do not acquire her.>

I swallowed again, leaning forward to grasp her hand with mine. She smiled, and I smiled back—weakly—letting go as quickly as I could without being rude.

More scribbling. Impatient, I began to morph into my armor so that I would be able to thought-speak again. <She’s a little miffed that neither one of us mentioned you were a teenager,> Paul continued, translating. <She says—>

He paused, reading carefully.

<She wants to know if you know anything about the—roadrunners? Am I reading that corr—>

“Yes,” she said aloud. She began writing at breakneck speed, twisting awkwardly in her chair so that Paul could read as she went along.

<She says there was an incident yesterday—in Ventura County—about twenty-five minutes prior to impact. Extremely strong winds—car windows breaking in a rolling shock wave—a couple of sonic booms. All heading away from the city—mostly northwest—along the coast. Described by eyewitnesses as being like the roadrunner in the cartoon. They were about to dispatch investigators when—well.>

I frowned. <What—> I began, my thought-speak returning as my morph passed the halfway mark. <No—um—apparent cause? They didn’t see anything?>

“No.”

_Some kind of Yeerk vehicles, getting out before the meteor hit?_

But the Yeerks didn’t have anything that fast, or they would have used it to run us down when we started probing their operational security.

_Something new, maybe? Something they just developed?_

President Tyagi cleared her throat, and I twitched. <Sorry,> I said hastily. <I was th—I don’t know. Not related to us. Maybe it was the Yeerks, removing material before impact?>

She nodded tightly, adding a few more nonsense words to the page.

<That’s her best guess at the moment, as well.> Paul waited as she continued to write. <She wants—can you give another run-down of the Yeerks’ known capabilities?>

<What do you mean?> I asked him in private thought-speak.

<Stats and tech,> he answered quietly. <She wants a summary she can give to the military.>

I took a deep breath. A lot of that had been covered in bits and pieces during my long, winding explanation, but—

<One capital ship, waiting behind the moon. That’ll have a pool with half a million Yeerks in it, and be about three thousand feet long, with room for maybe twenty thousand crew. It’s got about a dozen beam weapons that can hit targets on the ground from orbit, and it’s got a force field around it.>

I’d spent a lot of time in the woods talking things over with Ax and Garrett, and then Marco and I had gone over everything again before I left.

<Pool ships usually come with a squadron of thirteen—we call them ‘Bug fighters.’ About the size of a school bus, usually cloaked and shielded, capable of hovering and maneuvering in the atmosphere. Beam weapons, crew of four, can carry ten or so in a pinch.>

President Tyagi was taking notes without looking down at the page, her eyes locked onto mine.

<Um. That’s it, as far as spacecraft go, but there’s supposed to be twelve more pool ships on the way, maybe five months out. As for Yeerks on the ground—>

I bit my lip. <They carry stunners, communicators, tracking devices, and spare Yeerks. Some of them carry Dracon beams, which are basically blasters or phasers. They seem to move around in groups of three or more—or did, I dunno about the ones who are left. They generally take one person, and then that person takes everybody around them, like family members or coworkers or whatever. They only once did a major, hostile takeover—that was the high school—and they’ve also done sneaky stuff like use hospitals to infest large numbers of people one after the other. Once infested, the Yeerk has total control, and access to all of your knowledge and memories. We’re not clear on what actually happens in the pool, but they have at least partial ability to transfer knowledge around between them, so new discoveries spread pretty quick. We’ve seen three other species in their invasion group—Hork Bajir, which are basically like ninja dinosaurs, very tall and muscular with lots of blades—Taxxons, which are giant cannibal centipedes, pretty fragile but dangerous in large groups—Naharans, which are like big orange spiders and have a lot of engineering expertise.>

President Tyagi held up her pad, and Paul leaned forward, squinting. <How intelligent are they?> he asked. <How are they organized?>

<Um. We don’t know anything about how they’re organized, except that Visser Three is in charge. Ax says they’re like, plus fifteen IQ points intelligent? Like, they sort of hijack the host brain to do a lot of processing, and the Yeerk tissue adds a little bit on top of whatever’s already there. Out of the hosts they’ve got here on Earth, that makes humans the smartest except for the small number of Naharans. And Visser Three, of course. He’s—um—Ax estimated somewhere between two and four hundred, IQ. Alloran—his host—he was basically like the Einstein of this generation of Andalites, and Visser Three is—not like other Yeerks.>

More scribbling. <And your group?> Paul translated. <Numbers and resources?>

I hesitated. <Um,> I said. <I’m sorry, Madam President. But—>

Paul raised a hand as President Tyagi raised an eyebrow. <What he doesn’t know how to say, Madam President, is that you remain a potential enemy combatant until you’ve been cleared of infestation, and even then you pose a risk until you’ve been proofed against _future_ infection. >

I grimaced. That was a charitable interpretation, to say the least—I wasn’t sure I wanted to give them details about the rest of the group under _any_ circumstances, though I realized too late that Paul could simply lift them from his personal copy of my brain.

_That’s assuming all of your info is still current. You don’t know what happened after Ellimist/Crayak/whatever-it-was sent you back._

At least he didn’t have access to any of _that_ craziness—it wouldn’t have been encoded into long-term memory, yet. Silver linings.

In front of me, President Tyagi took in a long breath through her nose, leaning back in her chair, her fingers steepled in front of her face.

<It’s a reasonable—>

Paul broke off as she reached for her pad and pen again.

<How do you guard against infestation?> he read.

I reached into my backpack in answer, drew out a pair of the Andalite earplugs.

<These will protect you from the Yeerks,> I said. <It doesn’t stop them from getting in, but it kills them in the process.>

She stretched out a hand, and I passed the earplugs over to her. <They hurt, when you put them in. There’s some blood. But they’re basically undetectable after that.>

I’d brought all five-and-a-half pairs with me to Washington, rather than leaving a pair for Garrett, a decision I was starting to regret. I’d tried to offer two to Paul, but he’d refused, saying they should go to someone important—like the President—or to engineers who might be able to duplicate them, or to field agents.

Switching the earplugs to one hand, she scribbled another note and held up the pad.

<She wants to know whether they work on Yeerks coming _out_ of the head, too. >

_What—_

Oh.

I shook my head. <Not enough proof,> I said. <Visser Three just killed something like ten thousand Yeerks for, like—just, you know, as a move. If—hypothetically speaking—you’re a Controller right now, I wouldn’t put it past you to pull a suicide mission just so you could get this information back to the rest of the invasion force.>

She tilted her head, her eyes asking the obvious question.

<There are two options,> I said carefully. <One is we keep you under total surveillance for three days. That includes bathroom breaks, that includes sleep time, that includes _everything._ You go nowhere, do nothing, without one of us watching, until seventy-two hours have passed. >

I could see from her expression that this option didn’t exactly appeal to her.

<The other is you let one of us acquire and morph you. In morph, we can check your memories of everything but the past twelve hours or so.>

It still wasn’t foolproof. It was conceivable—barely—that the Yeerks would’ve taken advantage of the confusion to capture her at some point within the past day. But given their level of risk aversion, this seemed _less_ likely than average, not more. She’d been on TV at least four separate times since yesterday afternoon, and Paul said they’d tripled her protection detail, in case the Ventura impact had been part one of a multi-strike terror attack.

It was theoretically something they could have pulled off. But—as Marco would say—if the Yeerks were that on-the-ball, we were fucked anyway.

_Not in control, never in control._

There was a battle going down on President Tyagi’s face, as she seemed to struggle with the implications of the two options. I’d initially expected her to reject both—to try to pull rank or make some other argument about being exempt from security concerns. But when we’d discussed it ahead of time, Paul—somewhat scornfully—had told me not to be an idiot, and not to think of _them_ as idiots, either.

“There are protocols for this,” he’d reminded me. “For infiltration, subversion, the use of hypnosis or mind-altering drugs or doubles and look-alikes. Everyone’s aware of the risks, and everyone’s committed to taking steps to guard against them. If what we’re asking her to do makes sense, she’ll do it.”

She picked up her pad, wrote a single word.

<Clearance,> Paul said.

She nodded.

<Neither of us has it.>

She nodded again, looking each of us straight in the eye for a long moment.

<The choice is obvious,> Paul said flatly. <Forgive me, Madam President,> he added. <But I took an oath. I will abide by it absolutely.>

She tilted her head, seeming to weigh his words. The silence stretched out, longer than any other in the conversation so far. I wondered whether I should say something—couldn’t think of anything—decided to keep quiet.

After what felt like a full minute, she began writing once again, this time taking the time to jot down several long sentences. She showed them to Paul, then reached for a second, official-looking pad with a presidential seal at the top.

<She wants to know how much you told Jeremiah about the morphing power,> Paul said, sounding slightly confused. <Whether he knows you gave it to me, for instance.>

She handed the second pad to Paul, who read it and frowned. Craning my neck, I saw that it was in English, not in cipher: _DHS J Poznanski to WH ASAP._

<Madam President, I’m not sure—>

“Do it,” she said, her tone brooking no argument.

Swallowing whatever objection he had been about to make, Paul rose to his feet and walked over to the door, handing the note to one of the aides waiting outside in the hall.

Beside me, President Tyagi cleared her throat again, and I turned to find her looking at me, expectant.

<Right,> I said. <I told him about the time limit. Told him that it was technology the Yeerks want, but don’t have. Um. He knows I can carry things in morph—saw me demorph holding a weapon. I don’t think I mentioned the acquiring process, or self-morphing. I didn’t tell him how many of us there were, or how the ability is transferred.>

Paul sat back down in his chair, and she pointed at him, as if to ask—

<No, he doesn’t know Paul can morph.>

Looking faintly triumphant, she bent over her pad again, writing the longest note so far. It took nearly two minutes, and when she handed it over to Paul, he read it through twice before responding.

<No,> he said, his tone equal parts shock and stubbornness. < _Absolutely_ not. >

 

*        *        *

 

They’d argued for nearly half an hour—him telepathically, her with notes written in increasingly jagged and insistent handwriting. They’d paused only once, when an aide knocked at the door—I hid under the desk—to say that Jeremiah had arrived and was sitting in the antechamber.

<Have him wait,> Paul said tersely, and—after shooting him the sort of look teachers give to Marco—President Tyagi repeated the same instruction to the aide.

<Please, Madam President,> Paul had pleaded, after the door clicked shut again. <The amount of risk you’re assuming here is _completely_ unacceptable— >

 _Death toll Ventura County ~600000,_ she’d scribbled, no longer bothering to take the time to translate into code. _That’s 200 9/11 attacks. We have 5 months. I will not sit idly by._

<You have resources you can rely on,> he argued. <NSA. DHS. This is what the Secret Service is _for_ —>

 _Compromised._ _Can’t wait. Next attack could already be incoming._

<Then leave Washington! Take the First Family and go to Camp David, or to Bastion, while we work things out on this end—>

_If just leave, Yeerks will track. This way, don’t even know to look._

<If something happens to you—>

_Then you’re backup._

_Welcome to irrelevance,_ I’d thought to myself, as the pair of them glared and gestured and argued and generally acted like I wasn’t even in the room.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about it—wasn’t sure _what_ I was feeling, what the pressure in my chest translated to, in words. It was to be expected, sort of—now that the grownups were getting involved, things were going to start moving faster. There would be decisions we had no say in, plans we had no control over—very soon, the message would spread, and we would be nothing but a very small cog in a very large war machine, special only because of our ability to turn into mice. If I kept recruiting on my own— _and I should, right? Probably?_ —then soon enough even that wouldn’t matter.

 _But that was the_ point, _wasn’t it? It’s not like any of you_ want _this on your shoulders._

I definitely didn’t, anyway. And we were obviously better off if the whole resistance couldn’t be taken out by a single bomb.

At the same time, though, I didn’t like the way the two of them had already written me out of their argument. As if my opinion didn’t matter, as if whatever _they_ decided was best was what was going to end up happening.

I mean, to be fair, it probably _was._ But that didn’t mean it _felt_ good. If I’d been less honest with them—showed up as Elfangor, the way I had at the start of my conversation with Jeremiah—things would be going down differently.

_Not in control, never in control._

Gods and asteroids. Might as well add _presidents_ to the list.

After trying every protest and objection in his arsenal at least three times, Paul finally gave up. Tyagi was the Commander-in-Chief, after all—when push came to shove, that was the end of it.

Even when she was asking him to give up his life.

 _Patriotism,_ I thought, feeling almost jealous. _Something to protect, something to die for._ Garrett’s face swam up in my mind, and the pressure in my chest turned into an ache.

I looked down at the box cradled in my lap, its sides glowing a faint, otherworldly blue, the strange symbols traced in deep, liquid black.

_Cheer up. You’re winning._

I looked up at President Tyagi, whose face was taut with nervous anticipation. Extending the cube, I nodded to Paul. I was out of morph, myself, as I had to be in my own, natural body to activate the device.

<Press your hand against the surface,> Paul instructed, and the President obeyed, her shoulders still as she held her breath.

I focused my mind in the way Elfangor had showed us, willing the box to recognize Tyagi, to transfer some part of itself into her. There was a hum, and a tingle, as if I’d stuck my hand into an electrical socket—

And then it was done. The glow faded, I nodded, and she pulled her hand away. Pulling open the bag, I stuffed the cube inside and zipped it shut.

There was a moment of silent expectation, in which the three of us all just sort of looked at each other, unsure what to say.

Paul spoke. <You’re _sure_ that I can’t— >

“ _No,”_ Tyagi said, her tone emphatic and final. She stuck out her hand, and Paul looked at it as if it were a snake.

“Now,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

His mouth a thin line, Paul reached forward, his pale hand clasping her smaller, darker one. They stared directly at one another for a long moment before both of their eyes fluttered shut in perfect synch.

Acquiring each other.

A few seconds passed, and then they each let go, their eyes drifting lazily open.

“Now,” President Tyagi repeated, her tone more gentle this time.

With a final, resigned nod, Paul stood. He began loosening his tie, as President Tyagi stepped behind the desk, unstrapping her shoes. I stayed seated, feeling awkward, trying not to look at either of them as I transformed into myself once again.

It took about ten minutes for Paul to complete his transformation—ninety seconds to demorph, ninety seconds to morph, and another seven or so minutes to don the President’s clothes. He tapped me on the shoulder when he was finished, and I opened my eyes to see his slight nod.

_Not a Controller, then._

The real President Tyagi had a much longer wait, as her instantiation of the morphing tech performed its primary analysis, decomposing everything that was Paul Evans into a set of instructions for building a perfect copy. She went ahead and put on his clothes, the fabric loose and baggy, looking oddly ridiculous beneath her calm, serious face.

The plan was simple, for all that it was completely insane—Paul would stay in the White House in morph, as a decoy, using the President’s memories to guide his choices and decisions. In the meantime, she would travel around the country under the radar, looping in various parts of the military and other potential key players in the war to come. Should anything happen to the “President Tyagi” in Washington, she would have the option of coming out of hiding or of continuing to operate in secrecy, as the situation demanded.

Paul had pointed out that his time limit of eighty-five minutes might not be enough to maintain the deception, and Tyagi had shrugged.

 _Figure it out,_ she’d written. _Or stay in morph permanently._

My jaw had dropped when I’d read those words, but Paul had simply nodded, his face a mask of grim resolve. I’d told them both about the coma, about the way Yeerk tissue would interfere with normal brain function, and they’d taken the information in stride.

<The papers,> Paul said suddenly. <Tobias—can you destroy them?>

I looked down, at the notes President Tyagi had written. <What—with the shredder?> I asked. <Isn’t that sort of—overkill? And it’s going to make a noise—>

He sighed, the expression still somehow very much _his_ , even through the body of the small Indian woman. <The bag, then. Take them with you.>

I looked over to the real Tyagi, who nodded. Unshouldering my bookbag, I slipped the papers inside, remembering the spare shredder and the stasis cylinder as I did so.

<What about these?> I asked, pulling them out. <Do they go with one of you, or do I take them to Jeremiah?>

The two Tyagis looked at each other for a long moment, saying nothing. Eventually, the real one pointed to herself.

<I’ll explain to Jeremiah once you’re gone,> Paul said.

Detaching the charge canister, I handed it, the shredder, and the stasis cylinder to the President, then—almost as an afterthought—added the single extra earplug to the stack.

<It’s easiest to take stuff into your morph if it’s in a bag,> I advised. <Just visualize the whole bag getting sucked away along with the rest of your body, and the morphing tech will take care of it. If you have four separate things, you kind of have to focus on all four at once—much harder.>

She nodded, and we fell silent once more. After another long moment, she pointed at me, then at herself, and then shrugged, an open question written on her face.

I considered. It was funny—what with all of the risks, all of the what-ifs, all of the things that could have gone wrong, I actually hadn’t given any thought at all to what I’d do in this moment—what would happen if everything went off without a hitch.

On the one hand, we almost certainly wanted _somebody_ to stay in touch with whatever resistance the military was putting together. On the other, not every adult would be as understanding as Paul and Tyagi had been, about the fact that I was refusing to give up the cube. The threat of a mental self-destruct would only go so far once I was surrounded by people who killed for a living—

_Stop stalling and flip a goddamn coin, already._

I reached into the bag once more, pulled out the burner cell phone I’d bought for keeping in touch with Rictic. <Take this, too,> I said. <It’s only got one number programmed in; that’s the other phone. I’m going to head back to Ventura, try to reconnect with the rest of my group.>

A shadow flickered across Tyagi’s face, and I made a mental note to set up a less traceable line of communication at the first available opportunity.

 _Am I being an idiot?_ I wondered, as she reached out to take the phone. Was there some obvious move that Marco would see, that I couldn’t?

I’d “secured” the President—better than, considering how impossible it all had seemed just twenty-four hours ago. Paul Evans was loyal and competent, and his access to Tyagi’s memories would make him a perfect decoy. And Tyagi herself was now Yeerk-proof and morph-capable.

Should I just go with her? It was maybe ridiculous to assume that I could protect her—once clear of Washington, she was overwhelmingly unlikely to run into any Controllers, and in her guise as Paul Evans, she was a fully capable government agent, complete with a gun, ID, and top-secret clearance.

But it might be worth it to stay more closely in touch. I could simply hide the cube and follow along. It might even be _easier_ to find the others, once I had government resources at my disposal—

_And then the military will know where they are, too._

I frowned. We were all on the same team—weren’t we?

_Except that you’re holding back valuable technology. You’re keeping secrets about the Chee and the Ellimist. And let’s not forget that there’s a pretty convincing argument to be made that it’s our fault Ventura County got turned to dust._

Oh, come on, no one in their right mind would—

 _As if. They’ll be all over it—reckless children, can’t be allowed to run loose, look what happened_ last _time they acted unilaterally, instead of passing along their intelligence to the proper authorities—_

I shifted slightly, looking back and forth between Tyagi and Tyagi Prime, now wondering if I was being a little _too_ paranoid.

 _It only takes one,_ the voice in the back of my head pointed out. _One mistake, one traitor, one honest difference of opinion from somebody who thinks they know best, thinks they’re in control. And there’s only one blue box. If you go with them, and something happens, that’s it—no do-overs._

And there was still that bit about Jake, Marco, and Cassie being somehow astronomically important, and me along with them.

And there was Garrett. Garrett, who I’d last seen an inch away from death, whose uncertain fate was gnawing away at the back of my mind. Garrett, who I hadn’t been there to protect.

_Your decisions, your fate._

I could feel my uncertainty waning—not because I was confident in what I was doing, but because I knew there wasn’t ever going to be a clear answer.

_Sometimes, things just happen._

I stood, drawing the other shredder out of the bag as I began to demorph back into my true body. <Okay,> I broadcast. <I guess that’s it for now, then.>

The two Tyagis looked at one another, then back at me.

“Yes,” said the real one.

<Stay safe,> said Paul, a look of concern on his borrowed face. <And Tobias—>

<Yeah?>

<Thank you. You—these last few weeks can’t have been easy.> He looked over at the President, who seemed to listen for a moment, and then nodded gravely. <Your country appreciates what you’ve done.>

I swallowed, not sure how to respond.

I finished demorphing in silence, stepped over to the door, and focused on the fly.

And then, feeling anticlimactic, I left.

 

*        *        *

 

I was so lost in thought on my way back to Jeremiah Poznanski’s house that I almost didn’t notice the telltale shimmer in the air until it was too late.

_Bug fighter!_

Banking sharply, I broke off my approach and darted into the boughs of a nearby oak, waiting to see if they would fire, wishing I’d chosen the snipe’s diminutive form instead of the larger red-tailed hawk. Three seconds—five—ten—

Safe.

_What—_

The ship was hovering, motionless, above and slightly in front of the house.

Directly over the front steps.

_Tractor beam._

Did Bug fighters have tractor beams? I had no idea.

_How can you have no idea? What—you just FORGOT to ask?_

I flitted across a small patch of sky to another tree, farther away, feeling the hawk’s heart pounding in my chest. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a panicked voice had started up— _get away get away get away get away—_ while another one simply laughed.

There was no way. _No way._ It was impossible, a coincidence so extraordinary it defied belief.

_A way to track morphing?_

Rachel said the Chee could do it—that they could somehow see the link between our construct brain and our real bodies off in Z-space. But if the Yeerks had learned how to do the same, they wouldn’t just be _waiting_ for me—

_Jeremiah. He was a Controller after all, or—or he talked, told his colleagues, somebody told the wrong person and they figured it out—_

No. Without any conscious input from me, another hypothesis emerged, clicking irresistibly into place.

_The bugs. The bugs in the Oval Office._

We’d been quiet, in case they were recording—had said almost nothing out loud, doing half the talking on paper and the other half in thought-speak.

But what if they didn’t care _what_ we were saying? What if they were only checking whether or not we were saying anything at all?

If there was ever a day for the Yeerks to keep a close eye on the President, it was today. If they had someone down in the security center—

— _and of course they would, it’s obvious, so much less risky than having someone there in person, it might not even be a Controller, just a data tap—_

—then they would know that a Secret Service agent had walked into the Oval Office without an appointment and insisted on seeing the President, alone—had held an almost entirely silent conversation lasting nearly two hours.

And in all that time, the only bit of data that had emerged from the room was a personal summons—Jeremiah Poznanski, of the Department of Homeland Security, was to make his way to the White House as fast as he possibly could.

It was just strange enough to stand out—just enough of a departure from the norm to make them curious, make them nervous, make them want to look closer, to confirm that their cover hadn’t been blown. They couldn’t take him in public, maybe hadn’t even put two and two together until he’d already arrived—

_—right? Oh, please, let them not have taken him already—_

—but sending a Bug fighter to camp out over his house, that was easy, that made sense, they could nab him as soon as he got home, take him and infest him and find out everything he knew—

They weren’t everywhere. They were just everywhere that mattered.

What was I going to do? Rictic—Rictic was shadowing Jeremiah, could possibly protect him or at the very least report on what happened to him. But I’d given up my phone, would have to break into a house somewhere to call him, and who even _had_ landlines anymore—

_Breathe, Tobias!_

If they already had him—

If they already had him, then they already had—

Not the President. She would have waited, would not have let Jeremiah in until she’d managed to morph into Paul. She would have stayed, and it would have been two against one, even with the element of surprise Jeremiah couldn’t have taken them both out, he wouldn’t have been able to bring a weapon in past security—

Or she would have left already, and Paul would have faced him alone, disguised—

_If they already have him, then they know we’re trying to spread the word. They know we’re telling people, that we’re building up a resistance, and they’re going to blow every major city and every military installation to hell—_

If they already had him, then I needed to get out of Washington ten minutes ago.

But they _didn’t_ have him. They couldn’t, it was too fast, there were only thirty of them—fifty at the most—it wasn’t _like_ back home, they weren’t everywhere, and besides, the Bug fighter—

The Bug fighter—

—didn’t make sense, if they already had him.

Right?

_That’s right, go ahead and think it through, because everything always makes fucking sense, doesn’t it, just take it one step at a time and it’ll all come together, nothing’s ever just random and crazy and batshit insane, you’re in control, you’re on top of things, clever boy with clever answers, Sherlock that shit—_

I darted away again—a third tree, then a fourth—fighting to pull my thoughts under control as I put distance between myself and the hovering ship. At maybe a third of a mile, I stopped, peering back across the treetops at the near-invisible menace.

— _shapeshifting, bodysnatchers, mind melds, teleportation, time powers, what’s next, maybe Visser Three’s going to show up with laser vision or telekinesis—_

Somewhere, off in Z-space, my real body was gritting its teeth as I forced—focused—muffled the unhinged babble through sheer willpower and kicked my thoughts into gear.

_All right. Bug fighter. Lying in wait._

_Options._

I could wait and watch. Could go back to the White House, try to find Jeremiah or Paul or President Tyagi or Rictic.

I could leave.

_—who do the right thing—_

I could—

I froze.

_No._

_Oh, no, no, no, no, no—_

I felt the laughter bubbling up again, felt it threatening to overwhelm me. It was too much, too perfect, too _orchestrated._ Like the whale, like Jake’s extra life, like the fact that Garrett had just _happened_ to be a heartbeat away from death when whatever-the-fuck-it-was decided to show up and start playing God—

Jeremiah Poznanski’s son was walking down the street.

He was half a mile away, on the far side of the house, well beyond the range of thought-speak but perfectly recognizable in my enhanced bird-of-prey vision. He was on foot on the sidewalk in the middle of the day—on his way home in the middle of a school day, the last person I would have expected and very nearly the worst I could imagine.

— _maneuvered into place by those you might call God—_

They would take him. They would take him, and then he would take his father, and that would be enough for Visser Three. They would give up on secrecy, and the bombs would start to fall. It was happening right here—right now, in front of me, the beginning of the end.

Unless.

I felt my heart beat even faster, the tiny organ thudding until it seemed like it was going to explode out of my feathered chest.

_Can’t do a flyby. He’s too close—they’ll see you, shoot you out of the sky._

I would have to switch morphs. Have to pick something that could get close, something that could get inside, could do some damage—

_Obvious._

I dropped out of the tree like a stone, already demorphing before I even reached the ground. There was no one in sight, and I didn’t bother to hide—just changed shape right there on the sidewalk, my real body swelling upward from the hawk’s slender frame.

The clothes wouldn’t be right, but that shouldn’t matter. The real question was what I should do with the bookbag—should I bring it with me, or hide it, and come back for it?

There was a crawlspace in one of the houses just a few feet away, its white wooden door latched but unlocked.

_Your decisions, your fate._

Still half-hawk, I waddled over, the bookbag puffing outward between my shoulder blades like Quasimodo’s hump. Eventually, it came loose, and I pulled it off my back, tossing it as far beneath the house as I could. Then I turned my attention to the shredder in my left hand, spinning the dial to maximum power.

_Here goes nothing._

Pulling the crawlspace door shut, I stepped away from the house, focusing on the memory of Jeremiah Poznanski. I kept my clothes outside of the morph, but took the shredder in, feeling it shrink and melt as my fingers thickened around it.

Leaning around the corner, I squinted down the sidewalk, my vision blurring and fading as the change progressed. It had been maybe two minutes, and the boy had been three minutes away from the house. He should have been visible on the sidewalk.

Instead, there was no one.

 _Good,_ I thought, as my shoes tightened and my body aged. That meant they’d taken him on board, were infesting him in the air rather than trying to do it in public.

They would do the same to me.

I began to walk, the last of the changes sliding into place, wearing the face of their target as I strode toward the house.

They would see me.

They would see me, and they would recognize me, and they would take me.

_—what needs to be done._

I felt the jerk when I was a hundred yards away from the front door, felt the sidewalk vanish out from under my feet as I was yanked upwards by my hair, my skin. I passed within the cloaking field, caught a glimpse of the brown metal of the Bug fighter as I hurtled toward the hatch—

There was a sound, a flash of light, and my whole body went numb and limp. The tractor beam guided me into a small hold and released me, where I fell bonelessly into a heap on the cold deck, face down, my forehead hitting the metal with a painful crack.

“ _Haff Yeerk,”_ shouted a voice, guttural and harsh. “ _Ghotal!”_

Another voice grunted in answer, and a shadow loomed over me, a nightmare of ivory blades and green, porous skin. A thick, clawed hand grabbed my shoulder, rolling me over, and with a snap and a hiss, a cylinder was pressed to my ear.

_Wait for it._

Warmth. Wetness. A slithering, probing tendril, like a tongue.

Pushing.

Pushing.

The hulking Hork-Bajir pivoted and left, its footsteps vibrating the plates beneath me. Somewhere behind me, I heard the whir of pistons, and the heavy stillness that meant a door had just closed, sealing me inside.

_Wait for it._

There was pain in my ear—pain worse than anything I’d ever felt, like needles of fire threading toward my brain. I wanted to scream, but the bridge between my mind and my body had been broken by the stunner, and instead I just lay there, motionless, not daring to think more than thirty seconds into the future.

 _Just_ _wait._

The needle thickened, widened—stretched something that shouldn’t be stretched—became a pipe, a funnel, a conduit through which the rest of the Yeerk’s body could slide into my skull. Something connected, and I felt a presence, as if someone were standing just behind me, their breath tickling the hairs on the back of my neck.

_Now._

I began to demorph, the changes sliding across my body like magic, numbed nerves disappearing one by one, replaced by tingling aliveness. I shrank, lightened, felt my tired adult joints tightening as my vision returned to normal.

For a moment, the Yeerk seized full control of my still-morphed brain—tried to shout a warning, to beg, to scream. But the parts of the body it had access to were still inactive, and I was the sole witness to its panic as the universe dissolved around it.

They would notice, eventually. Would hear the grinding of bones, see the thinning of my limbs and the thickening of my hair, catch the shifting of my clothes as the body underneath them changed shape. I might have twenty seconds, or I might have none.

It was a race—against time, against fate. I had rolled the dice—had finally, finally accepted that I wasn’t in control, and shouldn’t act like it. I was going to die, or I was going to live, and there was no sense in making predictions.

 _Come on,_ I whispered to myself, oddly calm as I willed the shredder to emerge from my palm. _Faster._

“ _Hrutnoj?”_

I remained motionless, except for the shifting of my half-morphed flesh.

_“Lamol! Rhapak mit ghotalandalite—”_

It happened as if in slow motion—the vibration of the deck as the Hork-Bajir approached, the swelling of my palm as the shredder returned from Z-space, the shift in temperature as I rolled over, one shoulder pressing against the cold metal while the other rose into the air. I saw the alien approaching, saw it falter as I raised the gun, saw its beaked mouth open wide with alarm.

I fired.

The blast passed straight through the alien’s head, punching a hole through the ceiling, revealing the clear blue sky beyond. The alien fell without a sound, its blades shrieking as they scraped across the deck.

“ _Ghotu buk!”_

I heard movement behind me, felt another tremor in the floor, and spun. The second Hork-Bajir was only a few feet away, framed in a doorway, its own Dracon beam already tracking toward my face—

I fired again.

This time, the ship itself began to shake, the floor bucking as the shredder’s beam burned through some amount of important machinery. An alarm began to whine, and the floor suddenly tilted, sending me sliding toward the body of the second alien as it collapsed.

A blazing bar of light filled my vision—a near miss from another Dracon beam. Blind, blinking, I slashed my own weapon in a wild arc, holding down the trigger. I heard a shriek of metal, the fizzling snap of broken electronics—

And then suddenly the world fell apart. A howling wind filled the hangar as gravity dropped to zero, the whole ship plummeting downward as it split into two pieces. There was a split second where I thought I might scream, and then—

_CRUNCH._

I slammed into the deck a millisecond later, letting out a strangled _whoof_ as every last ounce of air was knocked out of my body. My head collided with the floor for a second time, and I felt an icy pain in my right arm, just below the elbow.

I must have passed out, or at least blacked out, because I felt myself coming to—whether minutes later, or only seconds, I couldn’t say. Everything hurt, from the top of my skull all the way down to the bones of my feet, and it felt like I couldn’t fill my lungs with air no matter how hard I tried.

Someone was screaming—a long, sustained sound like an animal, coming from what I thought might be the remains of the front of the ship. Dizzy, gasping, I reached up to try to pull myself to my feet, only to see the world in front of me turn suddenly, bafflingly red.

I looked down. Everything was wet and dripping.

_Wait—_

It was like trying to swim through molasses. I wasn’t thinking clearly, could _tell_ I wasn’t thinking clearly, knew on some level that something was very wrong but couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

_You’re in shock._

Words. I knew what they meant, but they didn’t seem to _mean_ anything. My brain felt thick, stuffed, dull.

_Get up._

I tried to rise again, was treated once more to a splash of red, this time accompanied by a wave of dizziness that threatened to squeeze the world around me into a long, dark tunnel.

_Oh._

I looked down at my left hand, still gripping the shredder.

I looked down at my right, confusingly absent.

Left—there.

Right—

Where?

 _Your hand,_ a voice was saying—almost pleading, as if terrified I wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t notice. _The ship crashed and you lost your hand and you’re bleeding, you’ve got to do something or you’ll bleed out._

Bleed out.

Out.

I looked down at my left hand again.

The one holding the shredder.

_Yes! The shredder. That will work._

Frowning, I turned the shredder toward the stump where my hand was supposed to be, put my finger on the trigger—

No. Something was wrong.

Something—

Ah.

Lifting my finger off the trigger, I pushed on the dial on the side of the weapon, spun it until it was only a few notches higher than the lowest setting.

_Right?_

There was no answer, so I shrugged—fighting another wave of dizziness—and fired.

The pain was like a splash of cold water in the face, causing me to sober up almost instantly, half the cotton in my brain burning away as the laser beam cauterized the wound.

“AAAHHHHHHHHHHH!” I bellowed, the air ripping past my vocal cords, leaving me hoarse.

_My hand! My hand, oh, God, what happened—_

There was barely any warning. Just one quiet sound, the rattle of some small object tumbling across a slanted floor. Deep within my primate brain, some danger sense fired, and I threw myself sideways just as I heard the sound of a Dracon beam.

TSEWWWWW!

I hit the deck elbow first, the impact shivering up my arm and causing a terrifying _pop_ in my shoulder. Biting back a shriek, I rolled, staying low as another beam flashed over my head.

_Four. They usually have a crew of four._

The scream I’d heard coming from the front of the ship was still going. That meant the Controller shooting at me was the last of them. Or it wasn’t, and I was just dead.

I threw myself behind a twisted, shattered bulkhead, feeling a wave of heat wash across my face as another beam splashed off the metal just a few inches away, turning it a dull, angry red. Lifting my arm, I squeezed the trigger and swept the gun back and forth in a Z, praying—

There was a strangled shriek—a clatter—a dull thump—

Silence.

Not total—whoever was screaming up at the front of the ship showed no sign of stopping. But when I stuck my arm out from around the bulkhead, there was no response, and after a moment I stood, swaying dizzily as I balanced on the uneven floor.

It was a scene of total destruction. The Bug fighter had come down directly on top of the house, one piece demolishing the garage while the other smashed straight _through_ the second story and came to rest at ground level. All around me was shattered glass, splintered timber, chalky dust. There was one Hork-Bajir body near me, drenched in blood—my blood. The other—the one without a head—was nowhere to be seen.

And in front of me, lying slumped next to a handheld Dracon beam—

I couldn’t help it. I turned and threw up, heaving and heaving until there was nothing left inside of me. When I was finished, I staggered over to one side, giving the human body a wide berth.

I was about to start climbing out of the wreckage when I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye—a slow, rhythmic shifting of a thick, metal plate. Fighting back another wave of dizziness, I picked my way past the ruins of another console and looked down.

It was Jeremiah’s son, pinned beneath the sheet of metal but otherwise unhurt. His arms and hands were free, and he was rocking the plate back and forth, trying to tip it up high enough to wriggle out.

“Stop,” I said, and then coughed, my throat ragged and sore. “Wait. I can help.”

He paused, his head jerking toward me, his eyes narrowing. There was something wrong with his face—

Ah. Right.

He was too calm.

Controlled.

“I’m stuck,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless. “I think if you lever it up this way—”

“Shut up,” I said, spinning the dial on the side of the shredder again, setting the weapon to stun.

“Wait! I can—”

TSEWWWWW!

He fell silent, slumping back against the plate.

I tried to think, dimly aware of the fact that I was impaired, that I was in shock, possibly concussed, was probably at that moment dumber than a third grader.

There was no way to hide the wreckage of an entire Bug fighter. Visser Three might have managed it back in my hometown, where he’d controlled the police and the firefighters and the news, but this was Washington D.C., and there were at most thirty Controllers within a hundred miles. I could already hear the sirens winging their way toward me, could hear voices nearby.

I noticed that the screaming at the front of the ship had stopped.

_All right. No hiding it. Now what?_

I looked around. There was nothing obviously valuable to grab—no visible weapons, no clearly useful technology. Just a whole lot of dusty metal, interspersed with the remains of Jeremiah’s house.

_Pretend to be Elfangor?_

_Pretend to be Jeremiah?_

_Grab the cube and get clear?_

I took a deep breath, the darkness clouding the edges of my vision again. I’d lost a lot of blood. I needed to get to a hospital. Would the blood loss hurt my thinking while I was in morph?

 _It’s hurting your thinking_ now. _You need to get moving before somebody tries to talk to you._

I took a step, and then paused.

_The kid._

I looked at the prone body of Jeremiah’s son. I could get the plate off him, even with one hand—there was a broken pipe blocking the way, a pipe he hadn’t been able to see, but if I moved it, the sheet of metal should just tip up and fall away.

He was a Controller, now. The only one left alive, if the screamer up front had died of whatever started it screaming in the first place. They’d take him, imprison him, study him, interrogate him.

Or worse—if they didn’t believe Jeremiah, or if one of the other Controllers got to him, first—

_What?_

I didn’t know. My thoughts were still sluggish, my brain still fuzzy. But it seemed—

Bad.

I shook my head, immediately regretting the decision as pain spiderwebbed across my skull, sparking another wave of nausea.

What was the kid’s name?

I should know. It was embarrassing, that I didn’t know. I’d been his father not five minutes ago.

_Pull it together, Tobias. You need to get OUT of here. Now._

But the kid—

David. That was his name.

I raised my head and listened. The sirens were closer, but still distant, the voices still circling outside of what was left of the house’s outer wall. I had maybe a minute left. Maybe two.

I’d learned—something. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it had to do with situations like this, decisions like this. I was supposed to be careful. Or I was supposed to _stop_ being careful. One of those. I was pretty sure. Something about—

_Control._

_Not in control, never in control._

I looked down at the kid. He looked absolutely nothing like Garrett.

_God dammit, Tobias, MOVE._

I crouched, put my hand on his shoulder, and began to morph.


	24. Chapter 20: Aximili

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, sorry for the delay. As the story gets more complex, it's getting harder and harder to show a "complete" arc in a single chapter, especially since it's been a long time since we've visited a given character's world. This was a pretty tough one to write, especially since parts of it are somewhat autobiographical. Regarding the next update, I estimate 70% odds that the final chapter for this arc will go up within two weeks, and 90% odds that it goes up within 17 days.
> 
> Second, I know this is a bandwagon, but it's one worth jumping on—Ramin Djawadi's "Light of the Seven" is a phenomenal piece of music, I've had it on repeat for literally ten days straight, and it is the soundtrack to which this update was written. I have no plans to make "music for this chapter" be a thing in general, but I strongly recommend a) listening to it, and b) listening to it before or while reading this update.
> 
> Third, there are some people who are long overdue for shout-outs, and they include (but are not limited to): Ketura, callmebrotherg, StellarStylus, CouteauBleu, Elliot J, chaosmosis, MugaSofer, Chris B, 4t0m, rictic, Forest V, Aaron G, Braden A, Brian D, Alphanos, Nighzmarquis, ZeroNihilist, ObsidianOrangutan, scruiser, KnickersInAKnit, PeridexisErrant, Lana del Fae, luvsanime02, Daziy is SoniQ, rjalker, Rafinius, so8res, Quillian, Defender31415, and (of course) our beloved empress K.A. Applegate. If you felt sad that your name wasn't on here, drop me a note reminding me of your awesome and I'll make it up to you.
> 
> Fourth, and finally, in lieu of my usual beg for comments and reviews, I'd like to nominate this moment as the Moment When People Decide To Share r!Animorphs. If you were, like, THIS CLOSE to recommending it to someone else, or posting it on Facebook, or tweeting it, or sneaking a .pdf onto somebody's phone with a filename like jdsjournalDONOTREAD—well, please go ahead and make the jump? Ultimately, a story like this is only good relative to the number of people who read it, and if you've found it moving, thought-provoking, interesting, or even just entertaining, please seriously consider passing the word along.

[A SENSE OF LONGING, OF LACKING—AN EYE SWIVELS BACKWARD, AND A HAND GRASPS AT EMPTINESS…]

 

There are countless activities which humans engage in, which Andalites do not. The constant encryption of thought and meaning into sounds and symbols. The hedonistic, indulgent consumption of sensory-intensive nutrients. The resolution of interpersonal conflict through overt violence, subtle violence, and the implied threat of violence, rather than simple communication—

(—presumably because the encryption makes communication so difficult.)

I had been present among the aliens of Earth for only a short time, and had seen much to disturb and confuse me. But the most disturbing and confusing—by far—was the human need for sleep.

Andalites make use of stasis technology, of course—when spaceflight presents stresses our bodies cannot handle, or for urgent medical interventions. But there is no cessation of consciousness, during stasis—only _suspension._ The thought that begins as the field activates ends as it withdraws, and _you_ remain constant. To be truly _un_ conscious—to cease to think—to have your mind, your identity, your very self disconnected from the universe—to awaken with no knowledge of what has passed in the interim, having been vulnerable to all manner of intrusions and not even aware enough to notice them—perhaps to wake up _different_ —

It is abhorrent, and unnerving, and—thankfully—vanishingly rare. For every one Andalite who experiences it, there are twenty-four thousand others who do not. And most of those only experience it once, as the result of some trauma or accident.

Of those who experience it twice, nearly all are warriors.

I came awake slowly—agonizingly—fighting back waves of pain from the burns covering most of my left side. My thoughts felt loose and strange, the same strangeness that had been growing for weeks—

(—Garrett had taught me the word, a short handle for a unit of seven cycles, and I was both pleased and intrigued by the incongruous one-off abandonment of the usual human fascination with base ten—)

—suddenly magnified sevenfold. It was as though my mind were a sieve, and slivers of thought were leaking out, streaming off into the empty, echoing _eib_. I opened my stalks and—

Something was wrong.

(Something was wrong.)

((Something was wrong.))

(((Something was wrong.)))

I was on a hillside. A mountainside, really—surrounded by dirt and rocks and thick, gnarled shrubbery. I was outside, beneath the wide blue dome of the sky, though my inner sense of time told me that not even the forty-ninth part of a cycle had passed since I lost consciousness—

(Could I trust my time sense, after falling unconscious?)

I reached out to the idling cradle with my mind, felt its computer respond—

_Impossible._

(Impossible.)

((Impossible.))

(((Impossible.)))

My time-sense was unimpaired, and yet I was over a cycle’s walk from the epicenter, in the mountains to the northwest of the city—almost _beyond_ the mountains, in a position even a spacecraft would have been hard-pressed to reach without causing detectable disturbances in the atmosphere—

(Hypothesis: the others hijacked a Bug fighter during the escape—)

((Hypothesis: you are dying, and insensible.))

Moving gingerly, I pushed myself up to a standing position, staying water-run instead of tree-stretch, using my hands for support and keeping my ground eyes down. I felt a gentle pressure on my right shoulder, and twisted my stalks to see the hand of the alien Garrett resting in my fur. He said nothing, with words or mind—only looked at me with what I thought was concern, or perhaps confusion, or maybe just simple acknowledgement.

Beyond him, the human Rachel sat curled on the uneven ground, her knees drawn to her chest, her face hidden. She, too, was silent.

(Silent.)

((Silent.))

(((Silent.)))

 _Something is wrong_.

I do not think in words, do not compress my experience into modular, well-defined fragments. For me, _silent_ is a feeling, a handful of memories—as when I climbed the hill behind my family’s scoop before a storm, looked out across the world and heard nothing with ears or _eib_ —and unnerving as the bizarre echoing in my head was, it was somehow much worse when the thing echoing was _silence._ It dragged my attention—unwillingly—back to the _eib,_ to the deep, abysmal emptiness that surrounded me, as if I had cut off my stalks, leaving only my ground eyes—

_Enough._

(Enough.)

((Enough.))

(((Enough.)))

I forced my attention outward, feeling a twinge of unease as I noticed—far later than I should have—that it was _not_ , in fact, silent. Uphill, five figures stood in a tight clump, filling the air with their empty, maddening stick-speak, voices raised in anger and argument. Shaking the fugue from my thoughts, I matched stick-sounds to the face-sights in the humans’ pale imitation of names—Jake and Marco, gesticulating wildly; Jake’s brother—

(WHAT)

—and Marco’s father—

(WHAT)

—standing unnaturally still; the human hologram of Erek the Chee—

(WHAT)

—planted between them like a tree.

(Threat assessment—)

((If you kill them, Jake and Marco will react poorly—))

(((Erek may not _permit_ you to kill them—)))

(Hypothesis: it was Erek who transported us to this location—)

((Counterpoint—Erek could not have been present at the Yeerk pool without being forced by his programming into courses of action which are inconsistent with his presence here—))

‹ _Aximili—›_

My un-brother’s un-voice, interrupting the chorus of speculation with a whisper that was louder than all of them.

_‹Please, Aximili, you must—›_

I thrust it aside, silencing it along with the rest through an act of will, plunging myself into the present, into _external_ reality. _Orient,_ I commanded myself, ignoring the echoes of the thought as they skittered back and forth inside my head. Wherever this was—whatever was happening—the battle was not yet over. Tom Berenson and Peter Levy were Controllers, and the android Erek was a dangerous unknown; _none_ of them should have been there, least of all Jake and Marco, and given that they _were_ , Cassie should have been with them—

_Orient._

The feel of the alien’s hand on my shoulder. The pain of my burns, and the weakness that radiated from them, layered atop the cumulative exhaustion of long cycles without rest. The babble of stick-speak, which a part of me wearily moved to translate—

(—at least the situation does not seem to be critical, if they are merely shouting—)

_BLINDING_

Without warning, the world turned white around me, a searing light that peaked within a hoofbeat before halving and halving again, dropping precipitously through blue and yellow and leveling off in a deep and fiery red.

_What—_

(What—)

((What—))

(((What—)))

There was a heart-stopping jerk, and suddenly I was surrounded by flesh, pressed painfully against the bodies of the others, Jake and Rachel and Garrett and Marco and Tom and Peter—

(Danger—the Controllers—)

—and even as I tried to move, tensed the muscles in my tail and found them bound in place, the world around us began to burn.

_“Jesus fucking—”_

“Erek, what—”

“Cassie!”

“AAAAAAAAAAHHHH—”

Their stick-speak washed over me, a jumble of noises, worse than useless. Though the rest of my body remained motionless, as if stuck in thick mud, my stalks were free to swivel, and I noted details in the manner of a cadet under examination.

Erek the Chee was holding the seven of us together with one of his force fields, keeping us packed close and tight around his angular, mechanical body. I could see the faint traces of energy exchange at the boundaries of the bubble, the shimmering distortion as the field absorbed and dissipated heat, leaving us cool while the vegetation around us withered and ignited.

(Flames on only the oldest, driest plants. Stone and sand unaffected, no glowing or melting. Upper bound on temperature—)

((This is _indirect_ heat, the mountain stands between us and the source—))

(((—the source—)))

_The source._

Berating myself, I turned toward the peak of the mountain, where the glow was brightest, casting the peak into crisp, dark silhouette.

The mountain _also_ stood between us and the city. Between us and the pool.

I turned my eyes skyward again, this time searching for the telltale signs of radioactive fallout.

_‹Aximili—›_

None. It was blackbody radiation.

(Chemical explosives?)

‹ _Aximili, please—›_

Beneath me, the ground suddenly heaved, a rolling tremble only partially dampened by the android’s absorption field. Immediately, a part of my mind began tracking backwards, converting the delay between the flash and the tremor into an estimate of distance, confirming the obvious. I cobbled the numbers together, double-checked the orders of magnitude on the estimate, and felt my tail go slack within its confinement as my brain held up its hypothesis.

This much heat, from that far away, without fission or fusion—

(An _asteroid strike?)_

Beside me, the two Controllers began to wail—a ragged, animal sound, devoid of all intelligence, all restraint. It rose, and rose, until Garrett started keening and Jake and Marco began trying to shout over it—

—a part of me noted that the noise only made the _eib_ seem quieter, as if I had gone deaf in one ear, the contrast drawing my attention once more to the claustrophobic silence—

—while fluid began to drip from the eyes of Rachel in the way that Tobias had explained meant sadness, or anger, or sometimes both—

_Prioritize._

I turned my stalks to look at Erek, the robot’s true shape now visible, its disguise abandoned as it poured all of its resources into holding us apart from the heat.

(Interesting. Probable upper bound on Chee energy output—extremely efficient relative to size but not so impressive in absolute terms—)

A pair of moveable parts near the top of the android’s body swiveled in response, sliding to the side closest to me. It said nothing, did nothing, only gave the seeming of a stare.

_It seized us almost instantly, after the light but before the heat. Prior probability favors quick processing speed as the explanation, but—_

I looked around again at the inferno unfolding, the unfamiliar forest, impossibly far from the corridor where I had lost consciousness in the middle of a battle.

It knew.

(It knew.)

((It knew.))

(((It knew.)))

They _all_ knew, somehow—while I had been unconscious, they had somehow been primed to expect this, had met it with high emotion rather than raw confusion. There was an explanation, and that explanation included awareness that an asteroid strike was imminent.

(Sensors belonging to the Chee?)

((Intelligence gathered during the battle? Tom and Peter defecting with a warning?))

(((A _causal_ relationship?)))

With another twinge of unease, I noticed that I had not taken the obvious step of simply asking—that I was delaying, hesitating, atypically reluctant to speak even after accounting for the distress the humans were experiencing. I searched for the root of the feeling, tried to trace it back to its source and found naught but flimsy excuses—that this was a tense, emotional moment—

(Emotion is secondary to strategy; hesitation is the enemy of adaptation—)

—that humans did not respond well to mental interruption—

(Neither Marco nor Garrett was particularly vulnerable in this way—)

—that I was exhausted, drained both mentally and physically—

(Tired enough to die without a fight, cadet?)

The true nature of the inhibition eluded me, avoiding my attempts to see it, to name it. I knew that I should speak up—that ordinarily I _would_ speak up—and yet I did not want to. Not enough to muster the necessary energy.

_‹Aximili, this is a dangerous sign—›_

I ignored the voice. Elfangor was gone—had tricked me, left me, and died. His ghost had no claim on my attention, and I no longer desired his counsel.

(Aximili, this is a dangerous sign—)

Instead, I simply waited, and listened—as the fires burned out and a hail of rock and dust began to fall, as the shock wave passed through and whipped around the sides of the mountain, as the android relaxed his force field and we moved awkwardly apart, the Controllers remaining within their invisible restraints. Eventually, the howling ceased and sensible thoughts began to be exchanged; with an effort, I forced myself to pay attention, to translate their stick-speak into something resembling true language, and as I did, I felt my hooves close in horror.

There had been an encounter.

Time had stopped, and a creature had emerged from nothingness.

It had shown them visions—given them a choice—granted them a favor. Had snatched us from the flow of time and assembled us on the mountaintop.

The Ellimist.

(The Ellimist.)

((The Ellimist.))

(((The Ellimist.)))

The humans did not know—Erek could not have guessed—even now, they did not fully understand. I could hear it in their voices, as they struggled to make sense of it, to regain their balance. As they began to make plans, optimistic in their ignorance, unable or unwilling to grasp the larger truth which was unfolding, which had already ensnared us all.

I struggled to find the words, to break the thoughts into pieces which their alien minds could understand. I danced across a lifetime of memories, of stories, searching for examples that would translate, would resonate, that would convey to them the degree to which the game had irrevocably changed. But I found nothing.

They did not know.

(They did not know.)

((They did not know.))

(((They did not know.)))

 

*        *        *

 

(Hypothesis: it is caused by malnutrition, a reaction to the strange qualities of native proteins and carbohydrates.)

((—my nervous apprehension mounted as Artash-Enasi-Derumoi dipped a hoof into the water, scraping it across the strange lichen covering the riverbed. If it really _was_ Ellimist’s Fur—))

I looked out across the valley, at the sparkling lights of the small settlement below, unusually dim and subdued with all the dust in the air. Above, the sky was the deepest red, a shade lighter than black, reflecting the fires that still raged over the horizon. The air was heavy and quiet, each sound somehow isolated, as if the world were divided into compartments.

We had traveled a distance the humans reckoned as forty miles, carrying Tom and Peter inside of our morphs while Erek kept pace on the ground below. We had been unable to agree on a purpose or destination, and had settled for simply getting out of the dead zone unnoticed before hunger set in. The second we had landed and demorphed, the arguments had begun again.

(Hypothesis: it is an illness brought on by exposure to harmful microorganisms in the Earth environment.)

((—had kept the sphere with me for an entire revolution, as the black goo was consumed by blue-green cyanobacteria which were consumed in turn, until finally, just after my name day, I awoke to see movement, the wriggling of tiny creatures large enough to be visible without magnification—))

The humans were not doing well.

I could see it, with my stalks—even as a merely proto-social species, their connections with one another were of supreme importance. I remembered all too clearly how I had felt upon hearing the final confirmation of my brother’s death, and these humans had lost more—much more—and did not have the _dain_ for comfort.

(—there is something of the _dain_ in the morphing power—)

((—comfort—))

(((—power—)))

With my ground eyes, though, I could see only folly. Hypocrisy. Immaturity. They were not simply mourning—they were _horrified._ Shocked. Resentful, as if they had been betrayed, as if it had not been open warfare with lines clearly drawn.

I did not understand. Had they expected _no_ retaliation, of any kind, when they struck at the heart of the Yeerk infestation? Was it so unthinkable, that the Visser might visit upon them a vengeance that was—in all honesty—fitting?

Could they truly have failed to understand what they were doing until it was done to them in turn?

(Hypothesis: it is a reaction to the sensory deprivation experienced within the nested morph.)

((Counterpoint: it began long before that, and was not meaningfully intensified during the assault on the pool.))

(Obvious response: it _was_ meaningfully intensified, but the stress of the situation made it less noticeable. Or it is a response to the unconsciousness, instead.)

((Objection: there is no known precedent for unconsciousness causing anything like these effects.))

(Particular trauma to specific sections of the brain—)

There had been words, and words, and more words. Words surrounding Cassie and her fate. Words regarding Visser Three and his plans. Words about food, and shelter, and plans for the future—the new shape of our mission. More words than I could count, an endless cacophony against the backdrop of the _eib_ , and yet no consensus, no agreement. The arguments had collapsed under their own weight, suffocating beneath confusion and frustration and fatigue.

Rachel had stalked off in silence, the body of a grizzly bear erupting from her lithe frame as she disappeared into the trees.

Jake had made as if to follow her—had taken several steps—and then collapsed, fainting with grief or despair or simple exhaustion.

Marco had dragged his friend over to the fire and then returned as if nothing had happened, suppressing all visible reaction as he spoke quietly and calmly with Erek, his face no less a mask than the android’s hologram.

(—they brought us to the chamber, and without warning, the floor and walls had vanished, and we were a thousand paces up, with nothing beneath our hooves and hands but clouds—)

Garrett was doing slightly better than the rest—he had asked sufficient questions to satisfy himself that Tobias would have been returned unhurt to Washington D.C., and had then retreated to a corner of the clearing. He was there now, picking up various objects and squeezing them between his palms.

The two Controllers, on the other hand—

Erek had been holding them continuously within a force field, to prevent their escape, but it hardly seemed necessary. They sat limp—almost catatonic—their eyes glassy and their jaws slack. Neither had spoken more than fourteen words since the impact.

(—impact.)

((—impact.))

(((—impact had occurred some two hundred million revolutions earlier, ending the epoch of the quadrupeds and making space for the evolution and differentiation of the _dalit,_ an ancient, armored tunneling reptile. Tobias had seemed intrigued by this, had mentioned a similar event in Earth’s own history, but more recent—)))

(Hypothesis: you’re simply lonely. Stop exaggerating the importance of a normal—and irrelevant—emotional reaction.)

It made sense—the Controllers’ reaction. Tom Berenson and Peter Levy had no less reason to grieve than the rest of the humans, and on top of that, the Yeerks inside their heads had lost their entire—

Colony?

Nation?

Family?

(Hypothesis: it is a natural side-effect of an empty _eib_ , no different from what you would experience in the ritual of starlight.)

((Wait—how long have I been on Earth?))

Yeerk social structures were not well understood, but whatever the specific details of their relationships, it could not be pleasant to lose one’s entire pool—particularly not at the hands of one’s own commanding officer. Elfangor had estimated twenty thousand Yeerks, in total, and half of those had still been alive after the explosion, safe within ten thousand human heads.

 _Well—not_ safe, _exactly._

I took in a deep breath, feeling the stretch of skin across my ribcage, the ebb of tension along my spine.

 _And how are_ you _coping, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill?_

I let the breath out, lowering my tail to the ground.

Not well, if I was honest with myself. Even setting aside my growing nervousness over the fraying of my thought processes—

I had killed three Yeerks in my first day on the planet. Two more when I broke the bridge beneath the truck—

(—and two humans with them—)

((—two four eight sixteen thirty-two sixty-four—))

That was five, in total. One for each winter I could remember, of the nine revolutions I had lived and breathed.

Yesterday, we had killed _ten thousand._ If I took the seventh part of those upon my own shoulders, sharing the burden equally with the others, that was one for every cycle of my entire life. A death associated with each and every memory, and thousands more lost in the mists of forgetfulness.

(—watching, in awe and wonder, as my fingers melted and fused, shivering into an infinitely fine pattern of hollow spines as I shrank toward the ground—)

And then the Visser had responded. The Visser, and the Ellimist—

_Are you afraid, little one?_

I looked inward, sinking past the echoing silence of the _eib_ and into the warmer, closer peace of the _hirac._

I was—

It was—

(—we gathered in the moonlight as the elder wrapped his thoughts around us, drew us in, to the time before the Path, when all was new and unexplained—)

Not fear, precisely. It was more that I was uncertain—uncertain for the first time, the numbers having thrown into stark relief all of my unstated assumptions, the decisions I had never truly _made_ , but rather simply _accepted_ , receiving them by default from my brother, my instructors, my people.

I had nearly died. If I had not realized in time—if Rachel and Garrett had not been close enough to intervene—

(Hypothesis: you lack the necessary qualities of a warrior.)

I had not had time to think, when the chamber containing the absorption field generator exploded. But if I _had_ , I would not have expected to awaken. I would have met my end alone, surrounded by aliens I had never met, aliens I had sworn to destroy, who were even then dying around me in the fire we had kindled in their stronghold.

((—seven and a half cycles.))

I blinked, double-checking the number.

Yes—not counting the time beneath the waves, I had spent a little over seven and a half cycles in the company of humans. Twenty-six in local time, given the dizzying, breakneck rotation of this planet.

I looked back down the slope, at the distant constellation of lights. We would go there, tomorrow—to steal food and gather news, anything that might help us decide what to do next. The pool had been an obvious target, a clear objective—now that it was gone, there was nothing to help us tell any one path from all the rest. A part of me suspected that the humans were not competent to decide, and that I should attempt to set the agenda myself.

Assuming that I wanted to. That this was still my place, and I shouldn’t simply leave.

(—leave.)

((—leave.))

(((—leave the scoop, and the orchard, and wander for seven cycles, avoiding anything that resembles a path until you find yourself alone with the sky—)))

I squeezed my eyes shut, pretending stone until the frenetic bouncing ceased, and the inside of my head was quiet once more.

_No different from what you would experience in the ritual of starlight—_

I opened my stalks, keeping my ground eyes closed.

Seven and a half cycles.

It wasn’t _quite_ right. I was late, and I was two revolutions too young to begin with. I had clear memories of only five winters.

But I could still perform the ritual, if I wanted to. Tonight.

I reared up to tree-stretch, looked up at the sky with all four of my eyes—at the choked, angry red, just barely brighter than black, the color of dried blood on a battlefield. There would be no stars. Not tonight, or for any of the nights in the near future.

I could morph, though. Could try to climb above the dust, see if I could make it high enough to catch a glimpse of the Great Path. And the meditation could be performed whether I was in my true body or not—might even be enhanced by the sensations of flight.

I looked back. At Garrett, a shadow in the distance. At Marco, closer, his expression too calm by half. At the hologram of Erek the Chee. At the unmoving form of Jake, the closest thing I had to a war prince since the death of my brother. I looked, and felt once again the odd reluctance to speak, a reluctance that had been growing harder and harder to overcome.

_These are not your people._

(—your people.)

((—your people.))

(((—your people.)))

I dropped back down to water-run, feeling the dirt beneath my fingers. If I closed my eyes, it felt just like the dirt from back home. But I could smell the difference in the air, taste it in my feet, the acrid bite of alien turf. And as always, the silence of the _eib_ was overwhelming, inescapable. It roared, echoed, smothered—an abyss into which my every thought disappeared, leaving no trace. A darkness infinite, with every light a billion billion billion paces distant.

(Hypothesis: the presence of other Andalites in the _eib_ is crucial to healthy psychological development, and a juvenile Andalite brain subjected to prolonged silence will be affected in dangerous and unpredictable ways. This is not known because it is unprecedented; on the homeworld the _eib_ vibrates no matter how far one travels, and no one of your age has ever been this isolated for this long.)

It had been the obvious guess, three cycles ago, when I first noticed the gradual shift in my thinking patterns, the beginnings of an unraveling. I had pushed it away, then—and again after my reawakening, when the effects could no longer be denied. I had come up with a double handful of alternative explanations, causal chains which minimized the seriousness of the phenomenon, which lent themselves to concrete actions or pointed toward prognoses less bleak.

Because if it _was_ the _eib_ —if the silence truly was breaking me—

What was there to do? The cradle had no Z-space capabilities, and the more I saw of human technology, the less confident I was that I could build a transmitter from local materials. Elfangor’s action had been unauthorized and unilateral—my people were not coming, and I could not escape.

(—escape.)

((—escape.))

(((—escaped from the net, dodging between Faramin-Lhorash-Watumorail and Eniac-Terrusso-Movalad as they burst from their hiding spaces. I ran like a flood, my limbs churning, my stalks turned back to guard as I waved my tail. At the last second, I chambered, coiled, and sprang, leaving the ground and striking forward with my tail blade to notch the victory branch, a full ten paces high—)))

I looked up once more, thoughts as dark as the sky swirling beneath the layer of my control. They shivered and shattered, spiraled and spawned, leaving me with the unnerving sense that my mind was no longer fully my own.

And if I _was_ my mind, as I had always been taught—if my thoughts were what made me, what set me apart from the rest of the matter in the universe, the pattern of a person, a sovereign algorithm—

_‹Aximili—›_

I drove the voice under, held my mind still as the ripples spread and faded.

I knew what my brother would say, and I did not care to hear it.

I focused on the avian I had copied from Cassie, the nocturnal predator with enormous eyes.

And without asking or telling anyone, I took to the air.

 

*        *        *

 

“What do you mean, ‘can’t’?”

The word was spoken with ice, somehow sounding like the soft whisper of a tail blade, and I felt my body tighten involuntarily in response.

(—if you must leave yourself vulnerable to one or the other, it is easier to heal from a slice than a jab, and the wound is less likely to fester—)

“I mean I won’t let you,” Erek said, his projected hologram projecting an image of a clenched jaw and tense shoulders as he let out a counterfeit sigh. “ _Can’t_ let you. My programming won’t allow it.”

Marco’s eyes flickered over to Jake, and then back to the two older humans, sitting reclined against nothing as the android held them in its force field.

“Bullshit,” he spat.

“Marco,” Jake warned, hard bone beneath the weariness in his voice.

“What’s he going to do, call the Ye—”

“ _Marco.”_

“Yes, actually,” Erek said quietly.

A long, tense, and stony silence greeted this pronouncement. Garrett tilted his head, and Rachel’s eyes seemed to glitter in the glassy morning light.

“Explain,” Jake said flatly, pinning Marco in place with a glance.

The android forged a grimace, eyes squeezed shut and lips drawn inward. From what I had learned of human expressions, Erek was attempting to signal reluctance, chagrin, and resignation.

From what I had learned of human expressions, Jake was unmoved.

“Look, you _know_ about the blocks in my programming,” Erek said, his voice strained as if it were difficult to get the words out. “I can’t commit _or_ permit violence—”

“Right, I remember that bit about a robot army stopping the Holocaust—”

_“Rachel!”_

“No,” Erek bit out. “She’s right. It’s stupid and inconsistent and it doesn’t make any sense, and it _doesn’t matter_ because there’s _nothing I can do about it_. Nothing, do you understand?”

He projected the image of fists clenching, of a hand scrubbing at a forehead, of legs jittering with pent-up nervous energy.

“Look. At this point, the—censors, I guess you’d call them, the subroutines that control my core functionality, they’re _aware_ of Temrash and Essak. Aware of them as individuals, as specific personalities, not as vaguely defined possible objects. I _know_ that they’re here, and I _know_ that you’re planning to starve them to death. I can’t just forget about it, and I _can—not—allow it._ Do you understand? And those same censors—they have access to _all_ of my systems. My communicators. My holograms. My force fields. My chassis. My _brain—_ if it comes down to it, those subroutines will hijack _me,_ and they’ll _make_ me come up with a way to save them. Even if it means taking Tom and Peter and physically giving all four of them back to the Yeerks, slavery doesn’t even _register_ compared to _death_ —”

_“You can’t!”_

Everyone jumped.

(—the sudden shout in the _eib_ as the hologram faded, revealing the Prince of Blades standing atop the hill, a shredder in each hand, his ground eyes bandaged, blind beneath his stalks—)

Eight pairs of eyes—five alien, one artificial—swiveled to focus on the face of Tom Berenson, wild beneath a mop of sweaty hair.

“You can’t,” the Controller repeated, his voice shrill and desperate. “If you send us back—he killed _all_ of me—of _us_ —”

“What—”

“The Visser!” Temrash shrieked, clearly on the verge of losing control. “Aftran—there were _twenty thousand_ of us, he didn’t even try to evacuate, he didn’t even _warn_ us, he wanted us _dead_ — _if you send us back you’re killing us! We may be the last ones left!”_

A blank, confused silence followed, as my brain gushed forth a useless mishmash of irrelevant memories and deranged speculation.

(—proper evacuation procedure requires—)

((—give you this one warning, Aximili, but there will not be a second—))

(((—intrigue in the Yeerk hierarchy? But what good does a self-imposed setback—)))

I realized—and looking around the circle, I was not alone—that until that very moment, I had not truly accounted for the weight of Visser Three’s action in _Yeerk_ terms.

(Open question: what are the limits of Visser Three’s authority? To what extent is he subject to morale and loyalty?)

(( _—know_ we covered this in training, _why_ didn’t I listen—))

“Well, at least we _all_ agree it’s a dumb plan,” Marco said dryly, though his voice, too, trembled.

“Temrash,” Rachel said softly, and Tom’s head snapped toward her as Jake’s lips tightened into a thin line.

“What?” he asked, his voice still unsteady.

“We’ve seen Controllers being—reckless. Is it—unusual? To sacrifice—”

 _“Unusual?”_ he shrieked. “An entire _pool?_ Do you not _know_ what—”

“They don’t, Temrash,” said Peter Levy—Essak—as he spoke for the first time. “You betray—”

“I betray _nothing_ ,” Temrash hissed. “It’s _Esplin_ who betrays, who’s betrayed us _all_ , Aftran lived for a thousand years and she’s _gone_ now, he’s _killed_ —”

(—one thousand Yeerk revolutions is five hundred and thirty-six Andalite revolutions is seven hundred and thirty-five human revolutions—)

The hologram of Erek lifted a finger, and the voice of Tom Berenson broke off as his body was raised into a standing position, brought to hover before the android. “What do you mean?” Erek asked. “What do you mean by ‘Aftran? By ‘last ones left’?”

“Temrash—” Essak warned.

“What’s left to betray, Essak?” Temrash shouted, tears streaming from Tom’s eyes. “What is left to protect? This one”—he gestured at Erek—“says he won’t let us die, which is more consideration than our own Visser has offered—”

“You are a _soldier,_ Temrash. The larger war—”

(—a warrior, Aximili—)

“Screw the larger war!” Tom’s eyes were wide, now, as Temrash swung his head away from Peter and looked straight into the eyes of the android holding him in place. “You,” he said. “I know you. You went to my school. You disappeared that day, along with thirty-five others. Korin Two-three-nine. You were _Korin_ , Korin of Aftran—”

“We returned the thirty-six Yeerks to Visser Three directly,” Erek said, his face suddenly uncertain. “We sent a message—arranged a dropoff—a Bug fighter came to retrieve the container we left—”

Tom sucked in a breath, and for a moment I thought Temrash would scream again, would rail and rage—

(—and the fury of the Prince of Blades echoed through the _eib_ until it shook the very air—)

—but instead he simply collapsed, sagging within the human-shaped cavity in Erek’s force field. “Then Korin is dead, too. Every scrap of Aftran save the two of us.”

“I don’t understand,” Garrett said bluntly. “Aftran is—your colony? The pool? What about the Bug fighter pilots? And the high schoolers? And the Controllers in Washington D.C. and all the other cities?”

“None of them were Aftran,” Essak answered softly. “Operational security, the Visser called it. One pool for Earth, one pool for space. The fighter pilots—the sleeper cells—they were Telor.”

“But—why—”

“I think—”

“Because we were _learning!”_ Temrash broke in. “Things that would change the war—that would change _everything._ Because we’d figured out that we didn’t _need_ him anymore!”

Essak sighed, lowering Peter Levy’s head. “They aren’t going to believe us, Temrash. Think how it would sound to _you_ , coming from a prisoner—”

“It’s the _truth!”_

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But this _proves_ it! The Council was right to suspect—he doesn’t serve the Empire, he doesn’t serve anyone but himself—”

‹Stop,› I said.

I had not spoken since the pool, and the word flashed out with more power than I intended, causing all six humans to flinch. I looked around the circle, at the confusion written in the faces of my allies, the signs Garrett had taught me to look for—furrowed brows, lightly downturned lips, tilted heads, unfocused eyes.

‹Jake,› I said, hoping the alien would understand and take over. I didn’t trust my thoughts, didn’t trust my own voice, for all that I was suddenly taut, all of the looseness and chaos of the past weeks vanishing in a moment of clear sobriety. The echoes in my brain had subsided, as if even the walls of my mind were suddenly listening, absorbing what they heard—

“Mr. Levy,” Jake said, drawing the older human’s gaze. “Essak. Start over. From the beginning.”

The Controller swallowed, his eyes flickering toward Marco’s for the briefest of moments. “You have to understand,” he said slowly, “we’re not just saying this so you’ll let us live. It’s the truth—”

“Prove it,” Marco snarled. “Get out of my dad’s head and let _him_ tell me.”

“I _can’t,_ ” he said. “You have no stasis chambers, no containers—there isn’t even a body of water nearby. If I leave my host, I’ll die.”

“Then—”

“ _Marco.”_

“I wasn’t going to say _die,_ fuck you very much. Get into _Erek’s_ head—he’s got a place where he can hold a Yeerk, doesn’t he?”

Essak pulled the strings, and Peter Levy bit his lip, the muscles in his upper body coiling and tightening. “It’s not that simple,” he said, his voice suddenly small and timid. “Marco—your father. He—he doesn’t want me to leave.”

 

*        *        *

 

There was silence around the circle, for once as total and oppressive as that which dominated the _eib._

Marco had cried, for a time—when Essak first left his father’s head, and Peter Levy had confirmed the truth with his own voice, his own will—but now his face was carved from diamonds, a solid mask that gave nothing away.

Erek pulled away, and we watched in morbid fascination as the last tendril of Essak slithered into Peter’s ear, leaving behind a trace of moisture. Watched as Peter twitched, small noises escaping his mouth as the Yeerk once again melted into the cracks of his cerebrum, their neurons fusing together into a single network.

“It’s still me, Marco.” Peter said softly. “Essak—he made sure I didn’t say anything, made sure I didn’t give it away to anybody else. But—he’s been giving me more and more control, and now—”

“Stockholm syndrome,” Marco spat, and Peter Levy winced, falling silent.

I did not ask.

There was a— _hardening_ , of Peter’s features—a tightening of Control—and from the looks on the humans’ faces, they could all see the difference.

Essak was back.

“You _knew_ your father was struggling with depression,” he said, his eyes fixed on Marco. “With alcoholism. With meaningless, low-paying work.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “With a son who still hadn’t forgiven him, for what happened to his mother.”

Marco said nothing, only stared with eyes of stone.

“We _helped._ We can see _all_ of it—see the patterns, the root causes. Tinker with the neurotransmitters, restore a healthy balance—”

“Hypnosis and drugs. You’re talking about brainwashing.”

“ _No,_ Marco. There’s no _need_ for brainwashing, when we can take complete control any time we want. We were _healing_ him—”

“Stop,” Jake commanded, as Marco’s knuckles began to turn white. “Not now, Essak. Maybe—”

He looked back and forth between father and son. “Maybe not ever,” he said bluntly. “Right now, we still have to decide what to _do_ with you.”

“You can’t send us back,” Temrash insisted. “The Visser will kill us.”

“You don’t _know_ that, Yeerk,” Jake countered. “He _could_ have just been trying to kill _us_ , and containing the threat of exposure at the same time.”

“ _What_ threat? We owned Ventura! Fire, police, news—there was nothing to stop him from simply covering it up. There would have been a hundred eyewitnesses all saying the same thing, a hundred experts all confirming the same story—”

“Until you started to starve,” Rachel cut in. “Don’t forget, I’ve _seen_ the cages. Seen what you do to people. To families. To kids.” Her eyes flickered toward Peter, toward Marco. “You can’t possibly have had more than a tiny handful of willing hosts—the rest of them were ready to watch you _burn_.”

“We weren’t _going_ to starve,” Temrash insisted. “We found a Kandrona alternative _weeks_ ago.”

There was a silence as loud as an explosion.

“ _What?”_ Jake spluttered.

“The oatmeal. Instant oatmeal, Ralph’s brand, the kind with maple and ginger flavoring—”

_“WHAT—“_

“—it’s not as strong as true Kandrona, the host has to eat it a couple of times a day, but as long as you keep it coming, the Yeerk can stay out of the pool indefinitely—”

Jake’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged. Around the circle, the rest of the humans were equally shocked, even Erek hoisting an expression of confusion and dismay onto his artificial face.

A part of me was reeling, appalled—the Yeerks’ most exploitable weakness, gone—another heavy blow for the larger war effort, which was looking bleaker than ever—

Another part of me was laughing, the deranged amusement of utter despair.

(The Ellimist. This is the Ellimist’s doing.)

“We weren’t through testing it, obviously. But we put thirty people on it, and we pulled a Yeerk out of the experiment every three days, and the first nine were all fine, no sign of any side effects, and there’s plenty of oatmeal to go around, even if we had to bring some in from the surrounding area, we could have easily lasted long enough to build a new pool—”

And then I made the connection, my impaired brain finally putting hoof and tail together—

If they were telling the truth about the oatmeal—

(—and what point was there in lying? Erek would force us to test it, soon enough, since neither the Yeerks nor Jake and Marco were willing to send Tom and Peter back to Visser Three—)

—if they were telling the truth about that, then they were also correct about Visser Three, who would not have wiped out the city _only_ to destroy us, he would have _known_ that there were better-than-even odds that we had dispersed beyond the immediate vicinity, even if the Ellimist had not intervened, both Tobias and the cube would have survived anyway—

(Alternate hypothesis: everything the Ellimist showed them was a lie, and it was the _Ellimist_ who launched the asteroid, or who arranged for the invasion to take place on a site that had been doomed from the start—)

—there _had_ to be another motive, something worth both the political costs of failure and the logistical costs of undoing every scrap of progress they had made—

(—not _every_ scrap; they still have the sleeper cells in other cities and whatever materiel the Naharan factory had managed to produce, plus ten thousand hosts’ worth of intelligence seized and lessons learned—

((—had this _all_ been a throwaway operation? Since the very beginning? A chance to taste the grass, to gather data on the obstacles before starting in earnest?))

“If what you’re saying is true,” Jake began, recovering his composure.

“It’s true,” Essak confirmed.

“ _If_ it’s true, then Visser Three—”

“It’s true,” Rachel said grimly.

We all turned to look at her, as she turned to look at Tom, stared straight into his eyes. “I’ve seen inside his mind,” she said slowly, seeming somehow to look _through_ him, as if she could see inside his skull, see the Yeerk wrapped around the human brain. “I’ve seen the way he thinks, the kind of plans he makes. I can never remember the details, but—”

She sucked in a breath. “It’s _exactly_ what Esplin would do, if you all were starting to turn against him. It— _fits._ It makes sense now, in my head. And it didn’t, five minutes ago.”

“But it _doesn’t_ make sense,” Garrett broke in. “It doesn’t solve his main problem at all. I mean, if they all—um—learned the power of friendship—after just a few months, won’t the next batch of Yeerks just—do the same thing? It doesn’t add up.”

“You don’t understand,” Essak said, sighing wearily. “We didn’t learn it all at once. We still hadn’t really learned it at all, yet. Peter is— _we_ are—special. Rare. There were experiments. Many of them were going poorly. It’s possible we would have made a different decision, in the end. But in at least a few cases, it was working, we were _leaning_ toward—”

“Toward symbiosis,” said Erek, breaking his long silence.

“Not even that. Look, I—you have to understand, we’re not _used_ to thinking of host species as having any kind of—of _dignity,_ of moral weight. On our homeworld, there’s nothing else that’s even as intelligent as a horse. Hork-Bajir, Taxxons—even the Naharans, for all their engineering brilliance—they don’t have rich, internal experiences, complex personalities. The first true intelligence we encountered was the Andalites, and they didn’t exactly inspire trust and friendship.”

Essak directed Peter’s gaze at me. “Of all of the pools in the Yeerk Empire, Aftran was one of the only ones—maybe _the_ only one—that could have opened this door. We could have led the way, perhaps. Perhaps not. But none of the _other_ Yeerks are likely to make the same discovery, especially not if Visser Three is manipulating them to prevent it. There are all sorts of things he might do—provoke early hostility, incite xenophobia and racism, kill off any humans that seem particularly empathetic. Or just focus on infants and toddlers, strangle the personality before it has a chance to become interesting.”

“You talk about your pool as if it was a person,” Jake observed.

Essak didn’t answer, instead turning to look at Tom, locking eyes with the other Controller for a long moment.

“It’s not betrayal,” Temrash said cryptically. “The _Visser_ is the enemy. We cannot leave him in control of the armies of the Empire.”

Essak took in a deep breath through his nose, gnawed at his lip.

“Aftran was the first,” Temrash pressed. “We won’t be the last.”

Essak let out the breath as if he had been punched, his shoulders dropping. “For that reason if no other,” he muttered, and turned toward me.

“There is a secret we have kept from the Andalites,” he said. “From the very beginning, from the moment you landed. It’s the reason we barred you from entering the pools, or observing the coalescions up close.”

He paused, looking into my ground eyes, and the last piece clicked into place.

 _—he killed_ all _of me—_

‹The pool is not simply a home,› I guessed, feeling the truth of the words as I spoke them. ‹The coalescion is not just a sharing. It is— _you_ are—one individual. Aftran was a single individual.›

I heard Garrett gasp, and made another connection in the back of my mind, to a day when a morph went horribly wrong—

“Yes,” Essak said. “She—I—we collected everything, all of the experiences of every Yeerk in Ventura county. We saw all of it, took part in all of it.”

“You _remember—_ ” Jake began.

“No.” Essak shook his head. “Temrash and I are fragments—shards—the barest scraps of Aftran’s personality. Like if—if someone took one afternoon of your life, and made a clone of you, and those were the only memories they gave it, just the things that happened between lunch and dinner on that one day. You’d be human—sort of. It’d be _you—_ but only sort of.”

“We make decisions together,” Temrash added. “As one organism, one mind, we absorb it all, and then we send out— _parts,_ I guess, parts of ourself, and those parts do—they do what they can, each one has a job, like different cells or organs, we’re _different_ but we’re all part of the same _self._ ”

My mind was racing, my thoughts leaping ahead as I formed new hypotheses, new explanations, it made so much _sense_ , how could Seerow not have _known—_

(—the intelligence of the coalescion must be far beyond that of a single Yeerk, beyond even that of an Andalite—an _entire race_ of Seerows—)

((—no wonder, in scarcely two revolutions they went from prescientific to successfully waging war against the most advanced species in known space—))

(((—how many pools are there on the surface, _we covered this in school—_ )))

Wait. I had seen holograms of the Gedds who traveled with Seerow—seen them follow him across the planet. They had fed in many different pools—

Oh.

‹Individual Yeerks moving between pools—this is how you communicate?›

Essak nodded. “Memetic exchange as well as genetic. It’s the primary reason we feel driven to infest and expand—to find other pools to mingle with. We are blind, remember, and for every host there are a thousand others who never leave, who never get the chance to see for themselves. The sharing is the only way, our only door to the wider world—”

(—of course, a single pool, kept isolated on the surface—Aftran would have been maximally motivated to stretch, to grow—)

((—and the host influences the parasite, it must, there were no peace movements among the Hork-Bajir. The Visser used quarantine protocols because he wasn’t sure what effect _humans_ would have on _Yeerks_ —didn’t want to contaminate his entire assault force if something went wrong—))

The war council. I had to inform the war council, as soon as possible. _How_ the Yeerks had managed to conceal this for so long, I did not understand—

 _Or you could_ not _inform the war council._

I stiffened momentarily—involuntarily, before my brain caught up and I forced myself to relax again, hoping that none of the others had noticed.

“So the sacrifices,” Rachel asked. “The suicidal Yeerks. When they die—”

“No one wants to die,” Temrash answered. “But if you’re only losing a single afternoon, out of your whole lifetime—”

“We create and recreate our individual selves,” Essak elaborated. “If we need to sacrifice a part of ourselves, we can—build, I suppose you’d say, build a Yeerk that’s unafraid of death, that wants only glory, or cares only for protecting the whole—”

“—but we can’t do it too often, if we lose the parts of ourselves that are fearless then _we_ become fearful, if we give away too much of ourselves then what remains is no longer quite the same—”

‹Visser Three,› I broke in. ‹Esplin.›

Essak tightened the muscles in Peter’s face. “He was once Cirran. Of the seventh pool, the place where Seerow did his mad science. But—when we take a host—”

“No two species work the same way,” Temrash said. “We have to tailor ourselves to the host. To control a human takes a _lot_ of personality, of processing power. We literally have to put more of ourselves in—more neurons, more threads-of-being, a physically larger Yeerk. To control a Hork-Bajir, or a Gedd, not so much. And if you take the Yeerk out of a Gedd and put it into a human, it might not even be enough to influence your mood.”

Essak grimaced. “We had never taken an Andalite. And we had but one chance—”

“You put in too much,” Jake said.

He nodded. “Too much intelligence. Too much aggression. Too much ambition. Cirran—she thought that—to overwhelm the mind of Alloran, the greatest military strategist of the glorious Andalite race—”

“And so Visser Three, what—took over?”

“He levered us into war,” Essak said bitterly. “It didn’t take much—we were already furious with the Andalites. For years, they had looked down on us—imprisoned us— _experimented_ on us. Showed us the stars, showed us what was possible, and then refused to let us rise. They could have—it would have taken us a _thousand years_ to develop what they might have given us, freely, without cost to themselves. A single encyclopedia, _one single host_ with the knowledge of how to build a radio, a refinery, a rocket—”

‹You were speaking of Visser Three,› I interrupted.

“Like I said, we were furious. We had arranged to take Alloran as a hostage, to improve our bargaining position and get a closer look at Andalite military technology. But Cirran—Esplin, really, even from the start it was no longer truly Cirran any longer—he destroyed two Andalite cruisers and captured a third, and offered the Council a choice. He would prosecute the war for them, take the fight to the Andalites—”

“—and in exchange, we would provide him with one Yeerk every three days. One Yeerk to consume, for its Kandrona, so that he would never have to return to the pool again.”

There was yet another deafening silence.

“You—he— _what—_ ”

“He—something about the particular mix of traits, or the influence of Alloran’s mind—he is not truly Yeerk, any longer. He does not desire the sharing, fears the loss of his own unique personality. He has become a cannibal, and we pay blood sacrifice for his help in keeping the Andalites at bay.”

(—looking to maintain his position, to preserve his advantage—)

‹You never wondered at his failure to take another Andalite?› I asked, fury and relief flooding my mind in equal measure as the picture came together. ‹In battle after battle—no, even _before_ the battles, when he walked among us, unsuspected—you never wondered how he could fail to capture even a single, second Andalite for you to—›

“Did _you_ wonder, Andalite?” Essak snapped. “Did your people, in their arrogance, their conceit? Or did you simply think yourselves smarter than Alloran-Semitur-Corrass? _We_ had no cause to question Esplin’s loyalty. He gave us the Naharans in a _week_. In every battle, his command of strategy preserved enough Yeerk lives to pay his tribute a hundred times over. There are a _hundred_ pools as large as the largest thirteen on the homeworld.”

“Wait,” Rachel objected. “You said—your council, Tom said they suspected—”

“How could we not? There had never been a mind we couldn’t see inside, never been a Yeerk whose thoughts weren’t shared by all. He made himself suspicious by his very desire, something none of us had ever wanted—something we could barely even understand. The oatmeal we discovered—it will never be used by any more than the tiniest part of ourselves, and even then only in the direst need—imagine being only a fraction of yourself, if someone cut out your brain, left you just enough to be aware of everything you’d lost—”

“But he brought us hosts,” Temrash said, picking up the thread. “He brought us hosts, and he held back the scourge of the Andalites, who even now would drive us back to the mud puddles of our homeworld—”

“You _enslave people,_ ” Jake snapped. “You’re using my _brother’s face_ to talk to me about how the Andalites aren’t treating you right? Which one of you _started_ this war?”

“We learned,” Temrash shot back. “Peace _is_ possible. And even now—Tom will admit, it hasn’t been all bad, I’ve helped him a lot—”

“Tom,” Jake said, his voice suddenly cold as ice. “Tom, don’t worry, I’m going to drag him out of your head and—and _eat_ him, Tom, he’s going to _die_ for what he’s doing to you—”

“ _Jake!”_ Erek shouted.

“For mom, and dad, and grandpa—you assholes, Ventura is _gone_ because of you—”

“Jake, _stop talking._ Stop talking _right now,_ before you force an override—”

I squeezed my eyes shut, sank into the _hirac_ , trying to focus. I could feel my thoughts spinning, feel a rising apprehension, as if there were some important question I was still forgetting to ask, some forgotten opportunity that would vanish and would not come again. I looked back and forth between the two Controllers, between my human companions and the android Erek, and struggled to think.

_Who started this war?_

I didn’t know. I knew what I was _supposed_ to know, but I didn’t actually _know_ it. I had had many thoughts the night before, as I drifted through the lightless sky—thoughts I’d never had before, thoughts I maybe _couldn’t_ have had before, surrounded as I always had been by the collective will of my people. For the first time, I was _unsure_ —not just of the answers, but of the questions themselves.

(—and now all of the knowledge that the Aftran pool pieced together—their empathy, their perspective, the promise of peace, a memetic weapon aimed straight at the heart of the Yeerk war machine—)

((—and now all of the intel that these two Controllers possess—the first defectors in the history of the species and quite possibly the last—))

—it was all here, in our hands by the slimmest of chances, a tangle of events complex beyond imagining, an outcome almost unthinkably unlikely, and yet each step toward it had felt obvious and inevitable—

And then I knew.

“—it’s _murder,_ ” Temrash was shouting, as I rose from my meditation, turned back to the conversation. “In the last thousand years, there hasn’t been a single murder, not one, no one kills an _entire pool—_ ”

“Oh, but you’ll kill _humans—”_

“No! _You’ve_ killed humans! _We_ want you alive!”

“Tell that to Melissa Chapman,” Rachel snarled. “To Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, Mr. and Mrs. Withers—”

 _“Enough!”_ Jake bellowed, as loud as I had ever heard a human, and they fell silent, Temrash and Essak and Rachel and Marco, four jaws clicking shut as one.

<Essak,> I said after a time, preserving the hush as I sent my words through the _eib._ <I have a question.>

Essak raised Peter’s eyebrows, and I continued.

<You said that you—Aftran—that of all the Yeerk pools, you were perhaps the only one that might have come to see the humans as equals. Is this something the Visser would _know?_ Does he know the—the temperament—of the individual coalescions at his command? >

“Yes,” Essak said, a hint of a question in his tone. “He communicates regularly with representatives from each pool. Sometimes—”

The face of Peter Levy tightened, and a lump moved in his throat. “Sometimes, I am told, he uses a Leeran morph before consuming his meal.”

<And he commands thirteen pool ships, correct? Twenty-six pools in total?>

“Forty. Many of the ships are much larger than the one that brought us here.”

<Where are they?>

Essak tilted Peter’s head, opened Peter’s mouth, closed it again. When he finally spoke, the words were slow and careful. “They were delayed,” he said. “A rift opened up, during transit—a Z-space barrier, isolating this system. Ours was the only ship that made it through. The Visser has often been away, at the edges of the rift. Studying it, I think, and looking for a bridge.”

<Is the rift impassable?>

“No. The other ships are still coming. But—slowly. What should have taken days is now a journey of months.”

I nodded. It was the most common human gesture, the first gesture Garrett had taught me.

_Who started this war?_

It wasn’t the Yeerks, or the Andalites—wasn’t Cirran or Esplin or Seerow or Alloran.

Twenty thousand had died the day before. Perhaps ten times as many humans, perhaps more. Before that, my brother—Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul.

Before that, the Hork-Bajir. The Taxxons. The Naharans, and the Gedd. The Garatrons, the Leerans, the Ongachic and the Skrit Na. Thousands of Andalite warriors, in a broken line that cut all the way back to Alloran himself—Alloran, who was captured, tortured, his every waking moment an endless torment as his brilliance was twisted against the armies of his friends, his protégés.

The blood of millions, on the hands of a being I had thought was just a children’s story. The Yeerks were not the enemy—they were pawns, as my people were pawns.

As I was a pawn. As Tobias and Garrett were pawns, and Jake my prince, and Marco and Cassie and Rachel my allies.

And yet—

What could I do? You cannot fight a _god._

Not unless it wants you to.

 

*        *        *

 

(—smell of burning hydrocarbons THREAT light glaring off of the harsh, unnatural planes of artificial caves DANGER follow the lines the angles calculate the distances closing in count down seven six five four three two one—)

((—held my blade against the throat of Ertai-Marcus-Lawran and felt the pressure in the _eib_ like a physical force DISAPPROVAL removed the blade and stretched out a hand SATISFACTION as the elders watched, weighing—))

(((—one billion Andalites, seven billion humans, one Andalite for every seven humans, it _couldn’t_ be a coincidence—)))

I should not have come.

Ahead of me, Garrett and Rachel moved comfortably through the thin crowd, untroubled by the chaotic sights and sounds and smells.

(—green plants sun drinking purple poison the reptile that lurks beneath the loose bark of the blackiron tree grey ashes and fog—)

((—are you listening to me, cadet? Yes? Then you will repeat back to me the significance of these three small peaks in the electromagnetic band—))

Faltering, I paused, stepped toward one of the artificial structures and leaned against it, the rough surface almost exactly the color of my human skin. I closed my eyes, pretending stone, trying to quiet the tumult.

It was getting worse—much worse—the pattern-matching processes of my brain running haywire as every stimulus sparked seven threads of thought and memory and speculation. It was as if my mind was trying to fill the vast and empty silence of the _eib_ through sheer volume of thought, burning through a hundred operations a second.

_Orient._

I focused on the feel of the wall against my palm, the heat of the sun on my face, the slide and shift of fabric against my body.

(—temperature to flux, flux to distance, distance to mass, mass to age, confirm against the color, gravitational attraction between the planet and the star proportional to the square of the distance between them—)

“Ax?”

My eyes snapped open to see Garrett standing beside me, a cautious distance away, his hands in the folds of his artificial skin.

(—eyes wide, brows converging upward, mouth closed with edges slightly downturned—)

Concern. Garrett was concerned.

“Ein—sorry—I am all right. I just—”

Garrett’s head turned as he scanned the street and sidewalk and buildings around us, the humans walking and talking and impelling their mechanical transports.

(—tiny furrowing of the brow, deepening of the frown—)

((—striking distance striking distance evade striking distance closing closing THREAT TOO CLOSE DANGER where is my _tail_ —))

I squeezed my eyes shut.

<Garrett, what—>

<Garrett here. It’s fine, we’re just—we’ll be there in a second. Go ahead in, over.>

There was a mental ripple that felt like a scoff.

“Thanks, _mom,_ ” Garrett muttered, almost too quietly for me to hear.

I partially opened my eyes to see the human boy lowering himself to one knee. Rachel was visible in the distance, her arms crossed, her eyes fixed on us as she waited outside of the entrance to our destination.

(—shredder power will attenuate by half for every forty-nine body lengths; adjust accordingly; setting seven—)

There was a tug by my foot and I looked down to see that Garrett was disentangling the lacing on my artificial hooves.

“What are you—”

“Hold still,” he said, not looking up. “This will help.”

I held still, closing my eyes again as the colors flared, every individual movement drawing my attention, demanding analysis, the profligate consumption of my cognitive resources—

(—trajectory—)

((—threat assessment—))

(((—chemical composition—)))

There was another tug, and I let out an involuntary gasp.

“Garrett—”

“Better?”

He continued to pull on the lacing, looping the loose ends over one another in a complex pattern, forming a quick, efficient knot. The hoof—

(—shoe—)

—the shoe was now significantly tighter than it had been, the foam and fabric pulled taut around the shape of my foot so that my foot-fingers were squeezed together and I could feel the pulse of my heartbeat with every passing moment.

“Yes,” I said, amazed.

It was as though Garrett had turned on a magnet, activated a gravity well—suddenly, all of the mental energy that had been spiraling outward was pulled in, the lines of attention anchored in the steady sensation of pressure.

“Good,” he said, shifting to the other foot. With deft fingers, he repeated the operation and straightened, peering into my eyes with a searching, questioning look.

I smiled, attempting to arrange my features into a reassuring shape. “Thank you,” I said, and after a slow, lingering nod, we resumed walking.

(—lines of attack, lines of retreat—)

It wasn’t perfect—on some level, my mind continued to fray, following paths of reasoning without reference to my conscious self. But the effect was one of a muted, buzzing distraction rather than an overwhelming cacophony, as if the past cycle’s worth of degeneration had been completely undone.

“How did you—” I began.

“Your face,” he said quietly, his eyes lowered to the pavement as we approached the giant storehouse.

“And you—where—”

“Tobias showed me. I don’t know where he learned it.”

He scuffed his shoes deliberately against the concrete as he walked—looked up toward the dust-wrapped sun and squinted. “Is it too much, or too little?” he asked.

“Both,” I said.

He nodded. “The worst,” he said simply. “Try humming.”

“Humming?”

He demonstrated.

I nodded. “Thank you, Garrett.”

“No problem.”

We stepped into the shadow of the building, Rachel uncrossing her arms as we approached. “All good?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Garrett said. “Ax forgot how to tie his shoes, is all.”

She snorted, the darkness under her eyes seeming to lighten for a brief moment. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

We entered the building, passing through the automated glass doors beneath the red sign reading RALPH’S. A blast of cool air passed over my face, surprising me, and when I opened my eyes again, we were in—

(—colors red orange THREAT yellow POISON green SUMMER blue SHREDDER pink AVIAN brown DESERT white BONE—)

—a madhouse.

If Garrett had not performed his magic on my shoes, I would have lost control on the spot. There was _so much_ —so much noise, so many things to see, smells that mixed and fought and tugged on some deep, animal instinct inside my human body.

“What _is_ this place?” I asked in a whisper.

“Supermarket,” Rachel said, reaching toward a rectangular metal basket with four wheels. “Come on, we need to get moving.”

The interior of the cavernous structure was arranged in aisles—long, parallel rows of stacked shelves, every shelf packed to the brim with colorful boxes and bags and cylinders. I trailed along behind the other two as they slowly filled the cart, asking questions as we went.

“Canned fruit,” Garrett said, as Rachel selected items and dropped them into the cart. “Crackers. Cookies. Um—made from wheat? A—um—a grain, ground up into a powder, and then mixed with milk—”

“Go ahead, explain cows to him,” Rachel said, turning the cart perpendicular to the aisle and traveling along the corridor by the wall, which was filled with giant, refrigerated tubs.

“Meat,” Garrett said. “That’s chicken, that’s beef, that’s pork—um—is any of this making any sense at all?”

“Chicken is—an avian?” I said, trying to parse the image that my translator was feeding me.

“Sort of.”

“And beef is—”

I frowned. The picture didn’t seem to make much sense, when compared to the term _meat_ —

“This animal is—composite? Made of—er—brown cylinders, and green fabric, and a yellow square—”

Garrett laughed. “That’s a burger. Beef goes _in_ a burger. It comes _from_ a cow.”

Another image, this time of a large, quadrupedal grazer.

“I do not see the connection between cows and milk,” I said.

“Forget it,” Garrett advised. “Here, look—breakfast aisle. Those’re Eggos, those’re Pop Tarts, all of those boxes are cereal—”

“—and here’s the oatmeal,” Rachel said grimly.

(—mutiny insurrection rebellion uprising traitor revolt—)

She reached out to the row of rectangular boxes, swept six of them into the cart. “One box is how many days?” she asked.

“Three,” Garrett answered. “Per person. So, one and a half, total.”

She looked down at the cart, then back at the shelf, then grabbed two more boxes. “There. That’s almost two weeks.”

She looked at each of us in turn, then gave a tight nod and continued down the aisle. Garrett and I followed, each slightly subdued.

There had been further argument over Temrash and Essak, over Tom Berenson and Peter Levy. Marco had moved to force Essak out of his father’s head, Peter’s own testimony notwithstanding. That issue had not been settled until the sun was nearly overhead, and then it had been followed by the realization that Temrash could not live permanently in Erek’s head.

“I don’t have any kind of nutrient delivery system,” the android had explained. “Water and neural interfaces were hard enough—we have blocks on self-improvement that we had to work around, and it took specialized equipment to ready the cavity inside my chassis. I could hold him, but he’d just have to go back into somebody else’s head twice a day. Maybe for hours, depending on how long it takes for the nutrients to filter through a human digestive system and make their way to the brain.”

The discussion that followed had been heated. Both Jake and Marco had suggested various ways by which Temrash might be killed, and Erek had again threatened to go to Visser Three, which had set the two Controllers off again. I had suggested status quo, to which Marco had responded _nobody asked you, Silent Bob,_ and also _go fuck yourself, dicktail._

There had been some talk of taking another human—someone from the town—until Garrett had pointed out that this would require violence, and that since we had discussed it in front of Erek, the android would probably not be able to ignore it. Erek had agreed, and Marco had called _both_ of them several words which the translator could not parse.

In the end, there had been no consensus. And since the oatmeal would buy us time in any case, it had been added to the list.

(—list the items in your survival kit: medpack, compact scanner, emergency rations for three cycles, three shredders. Cadet! Why three shredders, and not one or two—)

We turned another corner and entered a more open area of the storehouse, this one filled with large, square platforms covered in plant matter and smaller kiosks covered in an incredible range of soft, brown substances. Rachel and Garrett exchanged a few words and split up, leaving me with the cart as they each threaded between the platforms, grabbing item after item—

“Excuse me, sir—would you like to try a free sample?”

I turned.

Some twenty paces away, a young human in a uniform was waving in my direction, standing next to one of the smaller kiosks. It was built of slanted platforms, each of which held a number of round brownish blobs slathered in some thick, white substance.

“Come have a bite; they’re free!”

I hesitated, glancing toward Garrett and Rachel, each some distance away. Was it safe to leave our selections unattended—

(—eat want love desire hunger follow take delicious mine—)

I stopped.

(—mine get mine want mine must have—)

There was a smell.

(—mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm—)

Conscious thought fell away, leaving only primal instinct—a clutching, grasping, animal desire to find the thing, find it and eat it, what was it, where _is_ it—

I stepped forward toward the human, toward the display.

“Fresh out of the oven,” the human called, smiling as I approached.

If I had been more myself—more in control—if I hadn’t spent the past two weeks slowly unraveling—

“What—” I croaked, my throat suddenly tight with need. “What is it?”

“Cinnamon buns,” the human said, extending a gloved hand, one of the blobs cradled within.

—even then, I might not have been able to stop.

I took one bite—

Another—

I reached for the kiosk—

“Buns!” I screamed, _heard myself_ screaming, as if I were standing outside of my own body, a mere observer. “Sin sin sinnnnnnamon cinnamon bun bun bun-zuh!” The human backed away, shouting, a meaningless expression coming over its meaningless face.

I cannot describe it. The beauty. The ecstasy. The sheer, overwhelming bliss. I tore through the stack, shoveling the magnificent substance into my mouth hole with both hands, the last sane fragment of myself watching in helpless horror. I rubbed it on my face, my body—inhaled its scent through my nose—swallowed it in giant, unchewed chunks, savoring the sensation as it slid roughly down my throat.

The icing.

The filling.

The warm, chewy, texture—so _satisfying_ to gnaw, to bite, and yet dissolving to nothing on my tongue.

(More.)

((More.))

(((More.)))

I had never— _never—_ experienced anything like it. My normal, native body had _nothing_ resembling the human sensation of taste, only a simple organ for detecting whether a given kind of plant matter was palatable or not. My mind was awash in hormonal pleasure, everything else swept away by a wave of hedonistic desire. I did not care about the Yeerks. I did not care about my companions. I did not think. I did not exist. I simply consumed, was _meant_ to consume, was fulfilling the central purpose of the universe, which had come into being for the sake of cinnamon buns, had evolved morphing technology so that I could devour them.

 _No,_ some tiny part of me begged.

But the rest of me could not hear.

At one point, three humans in dark uniforms came near. They attempted to seize my limbs, to take me away.

I did not hold back.

It was some time later before another hand grabbed me, this one thick and black and leathery, wielded by a creature I could not easily overcome. It lifted me up, dragged me away, and I clawed at its face, at its eyes, screamed for it to let me go, to take me back, pleaded and begged and cried even as I tore at the remnants clinging to my shirt, dragged my fingers across my cheeks to collect the sweet sticky residue that covered my face—

_PAIN_

I reeled, my vision whiting out as something hit my head, _hard._

“Cinnamon—”

_PAIN_

Something cracked in my jaw, and something clicked in my mind.

<Demorph,> said a voice in my head, as hard and unyielding as steel. A voice I realized I had already heard, had been hearing over and over without understanding.

(—shame—)

((—confusion—))

(((—horror—)))

I demorphed.

 

*        *        *

 

“This is _serious,_ Ax. Why didn’t you tell us?”

I tried to break the thought down into words, and failed. It was just too difficult to convey, without the ability to access shades of meaning, to transmit emotion _as it was felt_ , and not simply as it sounded in summary. Words would not communicate the _why_ —if I said that I felt alone, and that this lonesome feeling made me want _not_ to talk to my human companions—

Even in my own head, it sounded idiotic, paradoxical. And yet it was _true_ —more than that, it made _sense._ It had been, on some level, the correct choice.

But I couldn’t say any of that.

<I am sorry,> I said.

(—a fool, an utter fool, an unworthy unwelcome child, a disgrace—)

((—put you at risk, forced you to morph in a public place, if someone had recorded you it would have been my fault, if Garrett hadn’t been carrying all the food—))

(((—a liability, can’t be trusted, better off without—)))

—and above and behind and around all of that, a deep and quivering horror at the swiftness with which the experience had carried me away. The degree to which I had been overwhelmed, stripped of my personhood, my core values overwritten by a single, animal desire—one that none of my companions seemed to have any trouble resisting.

Was I that weak?

That fragile?

(It could be the mind-sickness. Your defenses were lowered, your resources depleted—)

But that made no difference. My defenses _were_ lowered. My resources _were_ depleted. It was not some one-time, special case that could be dismissed as unlikely to recur. My past self had utterly betrayed my present self, instantaneously and without reservation, and if my present self were offered the same choice, it would sacrifice my future self just as easily.

<I am sorry,> I repeated, the packaged words inadequate, the shame too great to bear. <I cannot explain. It—I—>

I felt my limbs shake, and dropped down to river-run, then sank to root-lie, my ground eyes closed against the dirt, my tail flat and limp. Without the pressure of the human shoe to distract me, the silence of the _eib_ slammed into me with physical force, the weight of a black and featureless universe pressing down on my spine. I could feel myself sinking—lost—utterly alone.

It felt appropriate.

 

*        *        *

 

Somehow, they got me back to camp.

Somehow, they kept it quiet.

I didn’t know why.

Rachel said nothing, only glared at me in anger—

(—lower eyelids raised to narrow the eyes, tension in the lips and jaw, brows drawn together and down—)

—and stalked away, warning Garrett that I was _his problem, then._

He crouched beside me in the forest, his hand in my fur, and screamed into the _eib_ for as long as he could—a private scream, just for me, a note of presence that cut through the emptiness and wrapped around me like a blanket.

It nearly broke me—the relief, the respite. I collapsed—shaking—sobbing—grateful. It didn’t fix anything, but it _helped_ —gave me the clarity I needed to think, to reach my final decision.

‹Yeerk,› I whispered.

It was four in the morning as the humans reckoned time, the fire long since burned out, everyone asleep except for Erek, keeping watch. I told him I would speak to Temrash—told him I would approach, would perhaps even touch, but that I would keep my tail limp, would attempt no violence. I told him, and asked him not to intervene, knowing that he would watch, that his force fields would surround me, awaiting only the slightest justification to solidify.

‹Yeerk,› I whispered again. ‹Temrash.›

The human Tom Berenson stirred, his head sliding on the mound of dirt he had formed for a pillow.

‹ _Temrash,›_ I said, putting some force behind the thought.

He awoke.

‹Relax. I am not here to harm you.›

He turned to look at Erek, a dim silhouette outlined against the reflected glow of the town lights. The android nodded.

“What do you want?”

I moved closer, kneeling as I did so to make the movement less threatening. I rested my head against the ground, putting my stalks level with his eyes as he lay half-propped. They were twin pits in the darkness, motionless and unreadable.

‹I have two questions for you, Yeerk, if you will answer them.›

There was a long silence.

“Will you answer two of mine?” he asked.

‹Yes.›

I heard a soft hiss as Temrash took in a breath with Tom’s body. “Okay,” he said.

‹What did you think, the first time you looked upon the stars?›

Another pause.

“Me?” he asked. “Or Aftran?”

‹You.›

His shape shifted, and I could tell that he was looking up at the night sky, still choked and black with dust from the impact.

“Nothing,” he said finally. “When I first saw the stars, I thought they were just—specks. Like rocks in the sky. Gedd eyes—they don’t see well, and we knew no world beside our own.”

He was quiet for a moment, and I began to form my second question—

“I didn’t _really_ see them until the battle over Arn.”

I paused, waiting.

“We swarmed a colony of Hork-Bajir one night—a thousand Gedd, armed with stunners, and only a hundred of them. I was one of the first. I chose the largest adult I could find, pressed our ears together—”

(—death enemy madness cut kill consume—)

“I knew what the stars _were_ , then. When I opened my eyes—”

(—thief abomination burn erase undo deny—)

“I lay on that battlefield for an hour. We all did. Not a single one of us could bear to look away. There were so many, and they were so—so very beautiful, the skies of Arn are thin and clear, it was like looking into infinity—”

(—lies murder vengeance Elfangor smother strangle starve—)

“—and I thought—”

(—monster—)

“—I just wanted—”

(—die—)

“—to see. To touch. To hold. To reach out—to reach _up._ I wanted to fly up, and grab them, and bring them back down into the pool, to fill the pool with light so that all of Aftran could see.  There were so many—I thought—even if I took a hundred—a thousand—I could bring a thousand of them down, could string them across all the pools in all the worlds, and still there would be stars to spare.”

He fell silent, and I closed my eyes, remembering a hilltop, and the feel of my brother’s tail twining with mine as we both lay on our backs, our ground eyes skyward—

“My first question for you, Andalite. If you win this war, what will you do? To my people?”

_Know victory._

‹There is talk of a quantum virus,› I said. ‹Tuned to exact specifications, able to spread through Z-space. Only talk, for now—the virus doesn’t exist, may not even be possible, and may be too great of a risk even if it _is_ possible _._ ›

“But there is talk.”

‹Yes.›

He shifted, raising himself up to a sitting position, wrapped his arms around his knees. “Why did you wake me up, Andalite?”

‹Is that your second question, Yeerk?›

“No.”

There was another silence, in which the Earthbound insects chirped and the _eib_ thundered with echoing madness. We waited, each of us watching the other in the dark, as the sky spun invisibly around us.

“Why?” he asked finally. “Why did you hold us down? Why show us everything, and give us nothing? What did we do to earn such cruelty?”

‹We did not trust you,› I said bluntly. ‹We could not hear you in our minds, could not measure your intentions without first surrendering ourselves to your control. Why take the risk?›

Another silence.

“Your second question?” he asked.

I opened my hand, revealing two small, square packets I knew he couldn’t see. Quietly, I tore them open, pouring their contents into a neat pile on the ground. Rising, I placed a hoof over the pile, began to draw the flakes upward into my stomach.

Leaning down, I pressed the papers into his hand. He took them—paused—raised them to his face and sniffed.

“Maple and ginger,” he said, his voice cold and flat. Emotionless.

Controlled.

‹Tell me, Yeerk,› I said. ‹Do you think you could dominate an Andalite? Alone, as only Temrash?›

He said nothing as I finished the pile of oatmeal, scraping my hoof until I had consumed every last flake.

“Dominate?” he said, as I lowered myself back down to the ground. “No. Influence, perhaps. But Andalite brains are large, complex, and unknown.”

‹And you are a pacifist.›

Temrash laughed. “No. Essak is a pacifist. I was a persuader, a recruiter. Empathic, but as a means, not an end.”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his face close enough in the darkness that I could make out the shadow of his nose, a glint of light on each eye. “What game are you playing, Andalite?”

‹My name is Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill,› I said. ‹Brother of Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, who you feared as the Beast, the Vanarx, the blade that falls without warning. And this is no game.›

It was simple calculation.

One Yeerk, in need of a host.

One Andalite, unraveling, desperately alone inside his own head.

One war, that could end with death, enslavement, or something else.

I could see the hand of the Ellimist behind it all—the impossible made possible, the lines of coincidence, an outcome so unlikely that it had taken a prophecy, an asteroid, and a Z-space rift just to nudge the pieces into place.

And yet, even _knowing_ that I had been maneuvered—that I was at the end of someone else’s tail, dancing along someone else’s path—that even the death of my brother might have been _part of the plan_ —

Even knowing that, I could not muster anger.

Because my people _were_ at fault, for all that the _eib_ held them back from seeing it. We had learned the wrong lesson from the ancient war, had abused the Yeerks terribly, unfairly. That the Yeerks had repaid the favor with interest did not change our original sin, and at this point, each new horror was unjustified except by the laziest of logic.

That was the conclusion I had come to, when I floated aloft for the ritual of starlight, and found nothing but darkness, the dust of our battle blotting out the light of the stars. When I asked myself, apart from all outside influence, what _I_ believed—what I truly thought was right.

Visser Three was not the archetypal Yeerk, any more than Seerow had been the archetypal Andalite. Our war was an accident of history, a quirk of fate—it was not fundamental, it was not inevitable, and it need not be resolved through xenocide. If there was a chance of peace—even the tiniest sliver—it deserved investigation.

And it would be an Andalite who made the first move. Who took the first risk, just as we had taken the first liberty. _That_ was justice—that I had been chosen to say it, chosen _because_ I would say it, perhaps deliberately shaped into someone who would—

Well. It made no difference. If the Ellimist could see everything, know everything, manipulate everyone—

Then there was nothing to be done about it anyway, and the only guide I had was my conscience.

_Like the wind in thought and deed._

Moving slowly, so as not to appear threatening, I reached down, grasped the shoulders of Tom Berenson, brought my face close to his.

‹The stars, Temrash,› I whispered, as I pressed our ears together.

‹We can share them.›

 

 


	25. Interlude 5

 

**Interlude—Alloran**

They call it the Vanarx.

It’s a paltry monster, as warriors reckon such things. Fast, but not _that_ fast. Strong, but not _that_ strong. It slithers and hides, lurking in the cracks between boulders, but it is neither quiet nor clean, and anyone with their wits about them will hear or smell it long before it strikes. It’s no match for an Andalite or a Hork-Bajir, and rarely does lasting damage even to a Gedd.

It has but one talent, and that is _excision._ It strikes—constricts—drapes itself across the orifices of its victim and then, through some eldritch, unknown process, coaxes the Yeerk out of the neural cavity, drawing every last fiber into its slavering maw.

 _—I fought with every scrap of strength I could muster, lunging around the blocks Esplin had placed between me and my body, cutting at every point of weakness. I didn’t need to_ win, _only to_ interfere— _to delay, to sabotage, to buy time for the monster. A surge of psychic effort, and a leg collapsed beneath me—a searing flash of will, and the tail-strike Esplin had aimed went awry. A purple pseudopod landed at the base of my spine and stuck, growing heavy as the Vanarx poured itself through the fragile bridge, as it spread itself across my flank, and Esplin screamed into the_ eib _, a feral cry of black rage and mad terror—_

It has no equal on the Yeerk homeworld, no predator above save the light of the sun. The Gedds are helpless before it, which meant that for æons, so were the Yeerks. It preyed upon them with impunity, eluding their dull senses, evading their slow and clumsy limbs. Greater numbers only meant greater carnage, except insofar as forty-nine can scatter more effectively than seven. When Aloth-Attamil-Gahar dispatched a Vanarx that struck at a venturing party, the story spread across the planet like wildfire, elevating her to near-godhood and opening the way for the Seerow negotiations.

(They would perhaps have reacted differently, had they heard Seerow lamenting that Aloth had killed the creature immediately instead of pausing to make a recording of its feeding process.)

I did not understand their horror, at first—the hushed tones, the nervous glances, the trembling digits. There are other causes of death, after all, and for all that the Vanarx is inexorable—to a Yeerk—it is also rare. In two long revolutions on the homeworld, I saw only four, and only one at close range.

_—Esplin screamed at the others to fire, and I laughed at his desperation. They were long gone, every last one of them sent running by the first flash of purple. I turned all of my attention to my tail, fighting to hold it limp and useless as the monster enveloped me, a gelatinous film spreading across my fur like a second skin. I did not gloat, did not mock, offered the Yeerk no parting thoughts save one—_

But the Vanarx does not harm the host. Once it has consumed the Yeerk, it withdraws, allowing the poor Gedd to continue its usual aimless stumbling, until sooner or later it stops for a drink—

—at which point the Yeerks retake it, and the memory of death is reclaimed.

 _Every_ death.

Every desperate chase.

Every horrifying capture.

The last shreds of hope, vanishing as the purple closes in.

It is a nightmare that every Yeerk has lived over and over, a wound that every pool has felt untold times. Whether they carry the actual memories or not, every individual shard takes with it the _dread_ , the hopeless helplessness of an endless string of gruesome defeats.

It’s no wonder that even Esplin was afraid.

 _‹Die,› I whispered, as the film closed over my head, climbed up my stalks, poured into my ears and found its ingress. It began to sing—neither aloud nor in the_ eib _, and yet it was music nonetheless, a swelling, resonant harmony. I felt Esplin cringe, felt him burrow deeper into the folds of my brain, seeking sanctuary, tearing through my memory for something, anything that could save him—_

_‹No!› I shouted._

_But it was too late._

_With a triumphant howl, the Yeerk activated the morphing technology, the Vanarx falling still as the stasis field expanded, its soporific effect taking hold. I scrabbled at the edges of his thoughts, struggling to break his concentration, but it was futile—the creature had his undivided attention, and I was weaker than ever, having burnt through all of my reserves—_

That was the moment of my defeat. When Esplin, giddy with the glow of victory, of survival, dropped the veil and revealed to me his true intentions, and the last spark of hope began to die within me.

We Andalites do not use words, you see—do not connect two and three and four things together under a single name. For the most part, the Yeerks do not, either, but they developed spoken language—

(—or stole the language of the Gedds; at this point it makes no sense to think of the Gedds as a separate species with a separate history—)

—as a means of swift communication, communication between hosts, away from any pool. It is a shorthand—clumsy, and slow, and inexact, with subtleties of meaning often lost or misunderstood. For every seven words spoken, only four or five actually communicate what they were intended to.

The rest fall prey to the Vanarx.

And when the coalescions divide themselves into shards—

Each pool is frighteningly intelligent, moreso than any one Andalite—moreso than any _seven_ Andalites, moreso than seven _Seerows._ Intelligent enough that they managed to hide their true nature from us completely, with sufficient skill that even now the Council remains ignorant.

And yet, those minds are blinded. Crippled. Insulated, isolated, viewing the world through a thousand tiny windows, their information always slightly out of date. When they form plans and intentions—when they seek to impose their will upon reality—when they pass information back and forth—they must do so through tiny fragments of themselves, carried by slow and clumsy bodies, each with its own identity, its own sense of purpose—each wholly incapable of containing within itself everything it needs to execute its mission correctly. Compared to the pool as a whole, individual Yeerks are as mindless and stupid as the Gedds they master—projectiles, with just enough agency to throw themselves off course.

This, too, is the Vanarx.

It is tragedy, it is entropy—senseless waste and wasteful senselessness, all that goes wrong despite the best of intentions. It is feuds born of nothing, and plans that fail for no reason, the decay of cooperation into confusion and chaos. It is economics, and politics, and careless incompetence—everything that stands between reality and paradise.

When Controllers on the Earth obeyed an order that should have been ignored, and killed the identities of Walter and Michelle Withers in defiance of all sense and strategy, it was the Vanarx at work.

When they heard their Visser’s subsequent endorsement of discretion and flexibility, and interpreted it to mean _ignore security protocols and allow the enemy into your stronghold_ , it was the Vanarx at work.

(It is a title they conferred upon my erstwhile protégé as he cut their plans to ribbons, picking apart their war machine in silence, the blade that falls without warning. They flew out into the darkness, and one in seven was never heard from again, and they spoke the name of Elfangor with black bitterness—none more furiously than Esplin himself.)

For a species whose entire way of life is control, it is the ultimate profanity, an injustice woven into the fabric of the universe. The Yeerks seek to weaken it—through conquest, through the sharing, through the increase of their power in both extent and intensity.

But they also acknowledge its intransigence, do not underestimate its tenacity. They learned caution at the hands of an enemy that could not be defeated or controlled, and that lesson serves to temper their ambition. They avoid it, account for it, mitigate its butchery, but do not dare to contemplate its _end._ For all of their pride and their arrogance, they yet retain some measure of sanity, of restraint—there are prices they are not willing to pay.

Except for Esplin. Esplin, born of fear and desperation, who knows no boundaries, accepts no law. I have seen his thoughts, traced his actions, pieced together what scant pieces of the puzzle he has allowed me to see, and even that little is sufficient to leave me utterly speechless.

For all that he acts to bring down my people—

For all that he acts to raise up his own—

For all that he _seems_ sane and reasonable—

The humans are not his true target. The _galaxy_ is not his true target. His enemy is the Vanarx itself—not the creature, but the aspect of reality, as if it were possible to declare war upon the force of gravity. He seeks an end to uncertainty, the death of disorder, and there is no tool he considers too costly to wield.

(Already he has burned the monster of his homeworld out of existence, destroyed every last copy of its genetic code with a biological weapon wrenched from the Arn—every last copy except the one he acquired for himself. And the Yeerks, in their naïveté, took this as a _positive_ sign.)

((I suppose I cannot blame them. My own wisdom foaled on the ashes of Seerow’s madness, as the _Starlight-Shimmer_ and the _Guide-Tree’s-Roots_ burned and Esplin used my body to laugh.))

For a time, I put my faith in Elfangor. Dreamed that the prodigal prince might yet prevail—might perhaps even _know,_ might somehow have understood. For the whole latter half of the war, he matched Esplin maneuver for maneuver, ignoring all manner of bait, spurning all established military doctrine, striking again and again at the true heart of the parasite’s schemes with clairvoyant accuracy. I measured my student’s success by the frequency with which Esplin drove me under, cutting me off from my senses, locking me away—as if, by muting my laughter, he could convince himself he was not aware of it.

But in the end, Elfangor misstepped. Misstepped, and died—a lonely, ignominious death, leaving behind only a handful of untrained irregulars. Irregulars who had perished in turn when the meteor struck, having done the enemy no lasting damage. It was possible that some fraction of them had survived—some lucky few who happened to be outside of the blast zone—but in the end, it would make no difference. They did not know, could not possibly be on guard against what was coming.

Only I was aware. I, and my master. My slaver. My overlord.

‹Kill me,› I whispered. Not aloud, in the _eib_ —that belonged to Esplin now, who ruled it as surely as he ruled my tail, my fingers, my stalks. Quietly, into the stillness of the _hirac,_ where none but the Yeerk and myself could hear.

(And the Ellimist, if such truly existed. But if so, it had denied my plea seven-to-the-seven times, and was no ally of mine, nor of the universe it had allowed Esplin to be born into.)

I did not want to see the future, the shape that Esplin planned to impose upon creation. I did not want to be a part of his eternity, a cog in his machine. It was my final refuge—the unwanting, the rejection, the thoughts I flung into the abyss. It was my last rebellion against the creature who had beaten me in every possible way, who had used me as a weapon against everything I held dear.

And yet—

It was mine only because Esplin _allowed_ it to be. Because, in his amusement, he had decided to leave this smallest scrap of me unbroken. Because he wanted me to witness my own ruin, to taste my own despair. Because any further lessening would also lessen the torment, break the equilibrium of my misery.

‹Kill me,› I whispered again, more quietly this time. As quietly as I could—quietly enough that I could almost pretend that the thought was not my own.

Because who does one pray to, after all?

The very fact that I was asking was a loss. A betrayal. A capitulation. I lowered my voice in abject shame, and yet still I repeated the entreaty, my obeisance a confirmation of Esplin’s omnipotence, my appeal an implicit acknowledgement of his sovereignty. I paid tribute with my supplication—it was not a shout of defiance, or a scornful rejection, or even a final, tired dissent. It was an embrace—the final, crushing admission of my defeat.

I prayed to my god, begging him to end my suffering.

I prayed, with all my heart—without pride or reservation.

I prayed, and waited patiently—humbly—for his answer.

But it did not come.

 

 

 

 


	26. Chapter 21: Esplin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: Hey, all! It's good to be back from hiatus. I currently plan to post a complete round of chapters at a rate of one every 10-14 days. There will also likely be a couple of interludes here and there.
> 
> Part of the reason this break was so long was personal stuff, but part of it was that this chapter was VERY difficult to get right. If you think I haven't quite managed it, I'm eager to hear your suggestions—I expect this one will receive several minor-to-moderate edits over the next week, and (as always) love your critical feedback, as well as kudos for things that you enjoyed.
> 
> Don't forget that, in addition to comments and reviews here, there's usually lively discussion over at r/rational. Check it out for all your tinfoil and theorizing needs, and maybe get sucked into some other cool fiction while you're over there.

 

**Chapter 21: Esplin 9466**

 

_Confluence._

The Visser stood—motionless—thinking.  Lines of reckoning crawled forward in a twisted braid, thoughts swirling in stochastic parallel as he theorized, operationalized, falsified.

He was coldly calculating—weighing probabilities, evaluating priors, reinterpreting the same piece of evidence over and over again under each of a dozen different hypotheses.

He was wildly emotional—filled to the brim with rage and frustration and fear, riding the wave of survival instinct, sifting for insight.

He was unfettered, curious, inquisitive—generating ideas at a furious rate as he stretched beyond the probable and the possible and into the realm of the incredible.

He was all of these at once and more as he stood, quiet and restrained, a watcher in the eye of the storm.  He was aware, on some level, of the passage of time—of moments vanishing irretrievably into the abyss, the narrowing of possibility as various futures crept closer and others drifted past.  There was a cost to hesitation, a cost that grew steeper as the expected value of further thought plummeted.

And yet, he waited, alone on the bridge of his modified fighter, drawing on the strengths of every part and process of Alloran’s stolen brain as he struggled to process the implications—the sheer _enormity—_ of the information displayed in front of him.

It was no longer speculation, he thought— _allowed_ himself to think, the words cascading wildly through the layers of his mind.  No longer a quiet fear, almost unacknowledged, sufficiently ridiculous to be comfortably dismissed.

This was _proof_ , or as close as he was likely to get.

He reached out to Alloran, to the faint, passive shadow that had once been the Andalite war prince.  A strange feeling was rising within him, one he recognized from the memories of his host but had never felt himself—the fear of isolation, the desire for comfort and company, for an ally who might ease his apprehension, his uncertainty.

But Alloran did not stir, was somehow empty and silent beyond a veil Esplin could not pierce.  It had been that way for nearly a cycle—under other circumstances, that would have been the clear priority, a mystery of paramount importance, but _now_ —

Holding the swirl of emotion in check, he returned his attention to the display.

The map was a swirl of soft blues and deep purples, as wide as his body was long.  It showed the geometry of local Z-space in three dimensions, compressing the fourth.  There were the usual twists and folds, the usual irregularities—tunnels, resonant fields, singularities, voids.  An imperfect sphere dominated the image, a dark and ragged rift that enclosed a vast swath of space, with the Earth and its star hanging roughly halfway between the center and the edge.

And there, on the near side, represented by the faintest, narrowest possible line—

A bridge.

It stretched across the otherwise-impassible barrier, unnaturally straight and even smaller than its representation on the map—just barely wide enough for a medium-sized pool ship to pass through.  One end opened up just outside of Earth’s orbit, on the far side of the star, at a point the planet would pass by some half a revolution hence.  The other terminated in the dark emptiness between systems, on a line connecting the system with a distant red giant far beyond both Yeerk and Andalite territory.

That it existed at all—

Well.  Stranger things had happened.  The rift that had isolated the humans’ system was already unusual in its regularity, implying some unknown causal process at the center of the sphere.  Esplin had stayed well clear of _those_ coordinates, though he had dispatched four Naharan probes to approach it from four widely-spaced angles.

But the fact that he had found the bridge _now_ , after the crisis at the pool—that he had discovered it at _all_ , given its size—

There were two sets of tools for mapping Z-space.  One was a low level imager, essentially a telescope—with long and careful exposures, it could passively detect contours as small as a large gas giant, allowing navigators to plot safe routes even between planets within the same system.

The other was for studying the smallest features of Z-space.  It functioned like a laser, sending out a tight beam of radiation and measuring the properties of its reflections.  Its ordinary range was significantly less than the width of a star, and it worked in exactly one dimension—to gather information about anything wider than the beam, one had to take a series of adjacent measurements, and resolution depended entirely on how many individual data points one was willing to collate.

Esplin had mapped the entire system with the larger tool and found nothing of use—no breaks, no gaps, nothing he could use to bring the rest of his fleet into the system at speed.  He would have stopped there, were it not for Alloran’s incessant needling—an offhand joke from the war prince had pushed Esplin to set the smaller tool on a constant scan, with a dedicated subroutine set to alert him if it detected anything unusual.

That subroutine had fired just moments earlier, to report that exactly one of its pulses had returned zero data—no interference, no attenuation, no reflection of any kind.

 _One_ pulse, so perfectly aligned with the narrow bridge that it had traveled straight through, hitting nothing.

One pulse, fired at _exactly_ the right moment as his ship drifted past—his first re-check, mere moments later, had bounced back as expected, as had his second and third.  The path was detectable _only_ from a single, precise angle—if he hadn’t returned the ship to its previous coordinates, just to be sure—

Some deep layer of his mind ran the calculation almost by reflex—odds of discovering such a path by chance, odds of other such paths existing and not having already been found during his previous excursions—

With a series of quick, mental commands, he dispatched thirteen additional Naharan probes, assigning each a set of seven possibilities to investigate, coordinates and angles that seemed more likely given the already-established anomaly.  Then, taking a breath, he assigned two more probes to travel down the bridge and back, keying them to transmit a constant stream of data.  He had already checked everything that was possible to check remotely—the length of the bridge, the contents of space around the mouth, the spectrum of the distant star, endless permutations of the coordinates that might hold some clue or scrap of information.  There was nothing further he could discover without sending something through.  It would only take—

He realized he was hesitating, and focused his attention.

There had been a momentary sensation of hollowness, like a lull in the wind, or a missed note in the call of the kafit bird.  Something hadn’t seemed—

Ah.

Alloran.  There had been a moment, into which Alloran would have inserted some sly comment, some vague insinuation, some subtle goad—

Stretching, Esplin prodded the dark shadow again.

Nothing—not even resistance.  It was as if the Andalite were no longer there, as if he had ceded even the scant last shreds of personality to his overlord, vanishing in the process.

But what he _would_ have said—

Esplin waited, a mental finger hovering over the imaginary switch that would launch the pair of probes.  Again, he felt the pressure of time’s passage—the loss of crucial moments, an impulse to take action.

Alloran’s echo?

His own emotions?

Some insidious, outside influence?

Withdrawing the mental finger, he regathered his thoughts, focusing all eight layers of his mind onto the path of his previous reasoning, searching for a flaw.

_One: there are higher powers at work._

He checked the calculations again.  Nothing else made sense—under even the most conservative of assumptions, no other possibility came to within two orders of magnitude.

_Two: this discovery is not by chance._

Same reasoning.

 _Three: the higher powers are constrained, or at least not_ openly _hostile._

The evidence there was obvious, but Esplin forced himself to review it anyway—his ship had not been destroyed by any number of passing cosmic phenomena, his fleet had been delayed but otherwise had not been interfered with, he had been allowed to conduct his war on Earth without overt interruption, his continuous conscious existence had also not been interrupted in any detectable way (and undetectable ones were irrelevant for the purposes of selecting next actions)—the list went on and on.  There could be one power unwilling to act in certain ways, or two or more powers acting as checks on one another’s agency, or physical laws preventing certain kinds of interference even as they allowed things like interdimensional rifts isolating entire star systems.

But regardless of the specifics, Esplin was alive, and it seemed unlikely that that would change without reason.

_Speaking of which—four: your continued existence hinges on your next actions._

That one was more subtle, and it also depended on _five: you are being studied and modeled_.  Whatever entity (or entities) had created the rift and arranged for Esplin to discover the bridge, it (or they) had a goal (or goals).  Clearly, that goal depended in some way upon Esplin’s next actions, else the bridge would not have been placed where he would eventually discover it.

Time travel was impossible, given the shape of the universe—at least, so Seerow had thought, and had continued to think even as his madness caused him to discard so many other beliefs.  It was unlikely that there was some watcher that would eventually make changes to the past, erasing Esplin as he currently existed.

But even so, there could still exist a sort of backwards causality.  An entity capable of isolating an entire system would have enormous power and resources, and would be unlikely to spend those resources on anything less than star-bright certainty.  If there were a series of simulations, in which various artificial Esplins were exposed to various stimuli, and made various choices as a result, some of those simulations would be interesting to the watchers, and would continue—

—and others would be less interesting, and would _not_ continue.

That Esplin still lived meant that he was either in a true reality (and thus was already on the path the watchers intended), or in a simulated one that had not yet ceased to provide useful information.  He existed _now_ because—and _only_ because—of what he was about to do _next._

Which implied—

_Six: reasonable behaviors are more likely to be safe than not._

Regardless of whether he was real, Esplin was more likely to explore the bridge having been allowed to discover it than he would have been if he had _not_ been allowed to discover it.  The same was true for sending probes through it, bringing his fleet through it, alerting the rest of the Yeerk military—if the goal were to cause him to take some truly unusual action, there were cheaper and more reliable ways than presenting him with an enigma and hoping that he would eventually talk himself into it.  It was likely that the watchers expected—wanted—him to do something within the range of his usual behavior.

That being said, though—

_Seven: the goals of the watchers are not obviously your own._

Evidence—Esplin was not yet immortal, Esplin was not yet all-powerful, Esplin was not yet omniscient.  More directly, the rift had opened while his fleet was in transit, delaying twelve of his ships and—together with a string of blunders and miscommunications attributable to the Vanarx—ultimately causing the invasion to begin under extremely unfavorable circumstances in the last, least important, and most exposed of the thirteen target cities.

There were also considerations of timing—the discovery, taking place only after the destruction of Ventura, and the fact that the mouth of the tunnel opened up where the Earth _would_ be rather than where it _was._   Was there something special about the moment of closest approach?  At their current slow crawl, his ships would arrive thirty-nine local-cycles prior to that point anyway—

No, it was not at all clear that Esplin should attempt to _do what the watchers wanted,_ assuming it was even possible to guess.  Nor was it safe to try striking out in the opposite direction, to act in open defiance of an unknown force with unknown strength and values—in the end, the best he could do was attempt to reason from clear knowns and first principles.

A bubble of emotion rose within him, and he permitted it to exist and to grow, feeding it until it swelled to fill his mind.  Resentment seethed and turned to bitter fury, a sudden, impotent rage at the temerity of the unseen manipulator—that any being would _dare_ to play him for a puppet—that he would not submit to artificial constraints, warp his plans to accommodate the preferences of an unknown agent.  It was not allowed, could not be borne, was an insult that _demanded_ retribution—

Then the bubble popped, and a calmer, quieter Esplin watched the ripples drift across his thoughts.

_Either these feelings, too, are intended, and therefore part of the insult, or they are not, and therefore a distraction._

It was the same lesson Alloran had tried for years to teach his students, the one point upon which he and Esplin had agreed since the very beginning: _know victory_.  He did not suppress his emotions—they were a useful source of fuel, of intuition—but neither were they the tool that he needed, and so he set them quietly aside.

Survival first.  He needed time to study this new force in his universe—to understand its purpose, its methods, its limits.  What he understood, he could control, and once he had control—

Then vengeance would be his to mete out or not, as he pleased.

With another mental command, he powered down the last two probes, turning all four eyes back to the map—to the tiny line that represented the bridge.

 _By itself, a bridge is nothing_. 

What mattered was what would come across it.

Possibilities: himself, on his own ship.  The remainder of his fleet.  Telor, aboard the pool ship already in orbit.  Additional Yeerk forces.  Andalite forces.  Other, unknown entities.

_If it is intended as a trap—_

If it were meant to collapse as a ship moved across it, or if there were sensors at the far side that would trigger some unpleasant surprise—

Well.  In that case, sending a probe would most likely _not_ trip whatever metaphorical wire was in place, since it was the obvious cautious move, and could easily be done from an arbitrary distance.  By the same token, a probe was unlikely to produce useful information, and would simply be a waste of time.

If, on the other hand, the bridge were exactly what it seemed—the only quick path into and out of the system—then it was either intended to be net useful to Esplin and his allies, or to be net useful to their enemies.

If it was meant to be a boon—

Esplin himself could exit the system, visiting any number of allies in the larger theater and bringing them to bear on the struggle on Earth.  He could also direct the rest of his fleet toward the mouth, cutting their remaining travel time down to a third.

Neither of those moves was obviously positive, though.  He had been at the hidden manufactory on the fourth planet when the news of Aftran’s destruction came through, and had triggered the meteor failsafe remotely.  Telor had not even _known_ about the failsafe, and its reaction to the destruction would depend on a great many factors, only some of which Esplin was capable of influencing.  The governments of Earth were similarly unpredictable, and while additional resources would help, they would also greatly complicate the process of maintaining control over a fluid situation.

So that was one way in which the bridge could be intended as a weapon _against_ Esplin—by causing him to invite political discord at a critical moment.  Other possibilities—

It could be psychological, its enigmatic nature meant to trick him into _not_ using it, and then regretting it later.  That seemed unlikely, though, given that there were far less fragile methods of tampering with his morale.

It could be a path for Andalite-aligned forces.  But in that case, there was no point in alerting Esplin to its presence—under that assumption, the discovery was a boon.

Unless the Andalites were going to appear _soon?_   Would perhaps emerge while he was still sitting there, thinking?

His ship was already cloaked, but a quick command sufficed to send it around to the far side of the opening, such that any vessel arriving from beyond the system would have its back to him.

Ultimately—he reasoned—what the private discovery netted him was control over _access_ to the bridge.  He could publicize its existence within his own fleet—or within the Yeerk command structure at large—or he could keep it a secret, holding the knowledge in reserve for some unknown future.  Similarly, he could attempt to close it, or set up an observation system, or scatter mines across the opening.

Under _that_ framing, the choice was clear.  He had no pressing need to use the bridge right away—his current plans already assumed that there was no quick path into or out of the system, and that the rest of his fleet would not arrive for many cycles.

He began issuing another set of commands to the computer, this time a specific and complex series of images.  A light appeared on the manual control panel, and he reached for a pad, tapping out a lengthy passcode.

Beneath his hooves, the deck vibrated faintly as the cargo bay doors shuddered open.

The blackmines were a relatively recent development, originally conceived by Alloran and completed under Esplin’s supervision by a group of Naharan engineers.  They had been designed to detect the forward shockwave of a ship traveling through Z-space, send out a canceling pulse, and destroy it once it dropped back into normal space.  They were sensor-dark and radiation neutral—they would not be detected, and no one would be expecting them.  And with six hundred and thirty-seven of them arranged along the only possible approach vector, they would take out half of an incoming fleet before anyone on board had time to react.

With the deft expertise of an artist, he arranged them in three nested cones—one tight around the mouth of the bridge, another wider and further back, and a third wider still but twice as densely packed.

If Esplin or his allies needed to use the bridge, the mines could be neutralized with a passcode.  If enemies intended to come through, they were an excellent defense, especially as they were keyed to send an alert to Esplin’s ship upon detonation.  There were plausible scenarios in which unknown allies attempted to cross the bridge to come to Esplin’s aid unannounced, but it seemed at least equally likely that any such third parties would be hostile, meaning that the mines cost him nothing in expectation.

It occurred to him that this was, in the end, the obvious move—that he had neither given expression to his defiance nor attempted to manufacture an interesting outcome.  He felt once again the vague absence of Alloran’s voice, followed by an echo of his earlier indignation, and ignored both.

_Now is not the time to take risks._

Even if that attitude was exactly the intended effect.

Holding his breath, he gave the final command, unable to avoid a twinge of fear as he activated the mines.  Ignoring that as well, he turned the ship toward its next destination and powered up the drive.  It did no good to rail against fate, whether god or chaos or quantum determinism.

All one could do was play the game.

 

*        *        *

 

‹My gratitude, Quat of Taz of Zhin of Nik of Kon of Arn,› Esplin said formally, the computer transcribing the thoughts into a swirl of colors that danced across his fur.  Beyond the window, a thick cable stretched from his ship to the stolen Andalite ansible, where the image was encoded, encrypted, and compressed before being transmitted far beyond the Earth and its isolated sun.  ‹The Arn compose the chants unfold to fill the sky with light.  The Visser armed with chants deter the siblings burned the Arn.›

In the display, the image of the four-legged avian raised its arms, long wings unfolding behind them.  :::Respect,::: it signaled in a wave of green that rippled through its coat of feathers.  :::The Arn do not forget the Visser turned back the ships burned the trees protect the air sustains the Arn defend the Visser commands the ships turn back the stones cannot strike the Arn and the Visser flourish together.:::

Esplin raised his own arms, mirroring the gesture, and the creature’s feathers flashed red with pleasure.  A soft chime sounded from a panel behind the display, and lights flickered as the data began to flow, a long sequence of nucleotides and acids.

Neither the gestures nor the spoken thanks were strictly necessary.  Quat and Esplin had formed their alliance in the glow of Leeran hypersight, with full and intimate access to every layer of the other’s thought and memory.  The Arn knew the Visser was grateful, just as Esplin knew that the Arn was—

Well.  _Loyal_ was not the right word.  Esplin had yet to unearth anything resembling loyalty in the Arn, who spent as much of their lives as possible in complete isolation, each the unquestioned master of its own private fiefdom.  Everything that lived and breathed within an Arn’s territory was its property, so much so that they used the ecosphere itself to record their memoirs, painting their thoughts across the hillsides in swaths of bioengineered flowers.

But Quat would do what it had said it would do, and was satisfied with the terms of their agreement.  Was convinced of Esplin’s sincerity, and was sincere—and trustworthy—in return.  And since Esplin truly _was_ grateful, it seemed appropriate that he express his appreciation in the local style.

 _When in Rome,_ one of his human subordinates had quoted to him, _do as the Romans do._   The Yeerks had a similar sentiment, but it was seen as so obvious and natural that they had never found it necessary to put it into words.

‹The stones cannot strike the Arn,› he affirmed, a sentiment brusquely—almost brutally—short, in their story-centric language.  ‹The ships report the web is closed to catch the stones can harm the Arn.›

A smear of blue, translated by the computer into a sense of vague confusion.

Esplin tried again.  ‹Quat spoke with the Visser spoke to the ships finished the web can obstruct the largest stones threaten the Arn,› he said carefully.  ‹The web turns back the stones can kill the Arn.  The web turns back the stones can harm the Arn.  The web lets through the stones can frighten the Arn trust the Visser to continue to work to tighten the web grows thick and perfect for the Arn to flourish without fear.›

The blue lightened into a mottled teal of relief and satisfaction.  :::My gratitude, Esplin of Cirran of high lands of west of cold rocks and wide water,::: Quat said.  :::The Visser sows the seeds sprout into vines ensnare the stars shine bright with the story of the Visser.:::

It was a nicety, politeness for politeness—Quatazhinnikon cared nothing for Esplin’s story, confined as it was to the meaningless everything-else beyond the atmosphere of its homeworld.  Its sole concern was the safety Esplin’s ships could provide, and the price he would ask for that protection.

The Arn were a race of survivors, clinging to life on the slopes of a giant rift that girdled their otherwise empty planet.  The rift had been formed by a meteor strike, a titanic impact that had boiled off most of the water and air and left only a tiny, ring-shaped habitable zone where the crust plunged down toward exposed, open mantle.

Millions of Arn had died in the aftermath of the explosion, along with virtually all of the biomass of the planet.  And yet somehow, the remaining few had managed not only to survive, but to _thrive_ , using their native proclivity for bioengineering to create a forest of massive barrier trees along the slopes of the rift—trees that trapped the rising heat, converted the poisonous fumes into consumable nutrients and breathable air.  When that proved to be inadequate, they had altered their own physiology to better tolerate the new balance of gases, the new available diet.

And when tending the giant trees proved tedious, they created an _entire race_ of sapient caretakers, with bodies and minds so perfectly adapted to the task that the first Yeerk scouts had simply assumed they were the symbiotic product of natural evolution.

The Yeerks had almost lost their war, trying to take the Hork-Bajir.  Working from the depths of the rift, the unknown, unsuspected, unseen Arn had unleashed a suite of biological weapons that devastated the invasion force—giant monsters, noxious gases, insidious bacteria that caused confusion, madness, death.  By the time Esplin made contact and opened peace negotiations, they were mere cycles away from perfecting a retroviral plague that would have slowly spread to every pool in the galaxy before activating and extinguishing the Yeerks altogether.

Fortunately, the Arn had little concern for the fate of the rest of the galaxy—only for the future of their own ruined world—and Esplin had exactly the bargaining chip needed to secure a permanent cease-fire.  With a single command, work had begun on an orbital asteroid defense system that would protect the Arn from space debris for as long as Esplin remained in power.

There was a part of him that had balked at the idea of an inviolable planet, a place where his hand would not and could not ever reach, even after his ascent to dominance.  But the Leeran hypersight had allowed Quat to see his _every_ thought and desire.  There was no faking it—no way to plan an eventual betrayal, no trick or loophole.  If he _truly_ intended to leave the Arn alone, on a level so deep that he would actively defend against even his own attempts to change his mind in the future, then he could have them as allies, with all of their power and expertise at his disposal.  If he did not, he would have them as enemies instead.

The correct choice was obvious.

‹The Visser wonders after the chant Quat conceived will change the deep-shape of the siblings will no longer fight the Visser,› Esplin said casually, as the data transfer creeped toward completion.  ‹The chant to bend but not to break?›

It still amazed him that the other Yeerks had left him as the primary liaison to the master biomancers.  True, he had ceded control over the Hork-Bajir breeding program to Visser Two in payment, and the Arn’s unsuitability as hosts contributed to his siblings’ disinterest, but _even so—_

Quat twitched in a way the computer interpreted as good-natured frustration.  :::The Yeerks the Visser gave the Arn to test the chants are dead.  The path looked bright turns dark and twists and none can see a new path forward.:::

‹There is no chant which does the thing?› Esplin asked.

:::There _must_ be,::: Quat signaled, a streak of vivid purple slashing across its chest.  :::The sun will spin and light will show a path that Quat cannot see is already there.  Breaking is easier than bending requires a lighter touch and softer song is easier to make mistakes—:::

‹Respect,› Esplin hastened to interrupt, the computer transmitting an overlay of soothing green.  ‹The Visser holds the lesser chant will stop the siblings cannot harm the Visser is protected by the Arn are valued allies.  The Visser is grateful for the work the Arn have done more than any other could do, more than the Visser can do.  The chant the Arn cannot find does not exist, and the Arn lose no honor.›

It was a long shot in any case—the idea that Arn bioengineering might somehow hold the key to killing the greater Vanarx, as it had the paltry monster of Esplin’s homeworld.  Quat was a backup, a failsafe, like his private experiments with the Leerans.  His main hope still lay with the _Iscafil_ device—that he could capture a working model, or that the Naharans might yet reverse-engineer it based on Seerow’s stolen notes and Alloran’s own body.

Quat gave another irritable twitch, a tangle of colors dancing up and down its feathered torso.  There was blue confusion—Esplin suspected that some of his thoughts had failed to translate—but also red and green and ultraviolet and a thick splash of yellow that the computer read as grim determination.  :::As the Visser says,::: Quat signaled reluctantly.  :::For now, the chant the Visser holds will—:::

The avian broke off as another soft chime sounded, twisting its neck to look at something outside of the projection.  :::The chant is written,::: it said.  :::The Visser reads?:::

Esplin glanced at his own displays, confirming the successful transfer.  ‹The Visser reads,› he replied.  ‹The chant the Visser holds will stop the siblings cannot stop the Visser.  With luck the chant will not be sung, but the Arn have armed the Visser is their ever-friend and ally will not be broken by the siblings.›

A flash of green, a pulse of red, and Quatazhinnikon closed the connection with typical abruptness, its final reaffirmation lingering in the air as the display slowly powered down.

Esplin took in a long, deep breath—held it—released it—massaged the nerves and glands of Alloran’s body, gently loosening the tension that had settled into his shoulders and tail.  With another pair of mental commands, he deposited the string of data in the synthesizer and ordered it to begin production.

_One more stone in the sling._

With any luck, it was one he would not have to use.  Quat had promised that the virus would not be lethal, but could not rule out the possibility of permanent damage.  The “chant” had included the sequences for a counter-agent, which Esplin would use to inoculate himself, but still—infecting Telor would almost certainly mean the loss of most of his in-system resources, not to mention a break with the larger Yeerk command structure.  Either he would be recognized as the poisoner, or he would be seen as incompetent for failing to prevent it, and either way, it was a move to be made under only the most desperate of circumstances.

Should those circumstances arise, however—

Victory was survival.  Everything else came after.

Taking another breath, he decoupled the ansible and turned his ship back toward the distant, bright star.  He had delayed as long as he could—the Earth had cycled through most of a rotation since he had called down the meteor and destroyed Ventura.

It was time to face what was left of his army.

 

*        *        *

 

Telor allowed him to land under his own power.

It was clear that all was not well—there were far more Hork-Bajir present in the honor guard than mere protocol required, and no other ships on the docking bay floor.  But though the implied threat was obvious, the soldiers made no overt moves as he strode down the ramp, carrying only a small, silvery stasis tube.

In the time since he had become himself—become Esplin—he had largely shied away from his ancestral memories, the thoughts and feelings that reached back to the days when he had been Cirran.  It was—uncomfortable, to feel himself diminished, to dwell on the jarring dissonance between what he had been _meant_ to be and what he _was._

But as he passed the ranks of Controllers, noting the stiffness of their stances, the twist of their expressions, he could not help but be reminded—to feel the existential dread, catch an echo of the fear and shock and horror that filled his distant siblings.  It was one thing to know that he had condemned Aftran, and to be comfortable with the reasoning that had led to that choice—it was quite another to see that knowledge writ large across the faces of a hundred of his subordinates.

_Vanarx!_

It was the central horror—the true-death, the final death—not to be absorbed, dissolved, distributed, but simply to _disappear,_ to be erased as if you never were—your memories, your experiences, your very _self_ scattered back into nothingness, like tears in the rain.

It was an event so rare—so tragic—that the names of the lost were synonymous with the names of the ages, a pulsing heart that beat but once or twice a century.  Before Yaheen had been Carger, and before Carger had been Akdor, and before Akdor, Niss—earthquakes and flash floods, starvation and plague, a dozen elegies leading all the way back to Janath the Thousand-Eyed, whose murder at the hands of Odret had been the last tragedy of the ancient war, the atrocity that had birthed the compact.

Their planet had circled its sun eight hundred times since those days—eight hundred revolutions in which no pool had raised its strength to end another.  There was deception, and brinksmanship, and betrayal, but never _oblivion_ —at worst, a coalescion would be pulled into pieces, its parts absorbed into other pools where they eventually forgot that they had ever had another name.

But now—

Aftran was gone, erased, and it was clear that Esplin was responsible—the same Esplin who had _ended_ the Vanarx on the homeworld, who had mastered an Andalite and stolen the keys to the stars, who took no part in the sharing, instead demanding blood sacrifice from his siblings.  Already a paradox, he had now become a nightmare—the part of him that remembered calling itself Cirran recoiled in confusion, unable to reconcile the hero with the horror.

And yet—

—despite their revulsion, their dread—

—despite the compact, which made his life forfeit—which, in a way, each of them had _personally_ agreed to, in the waters of the first pool—

—despite the fact that he was alone in their stronghold, apparently unarmed—

—still his legend was such that they waited, frozen—with fear, with hope, with indecision—finding it easier to cling to the possibility of justification than to face the implications of betrayal.  He walked among them, and they did not strike—not one in all their hundreds.

_For that alone, they deserve their fate._

It was neither Alloran’s thought nor truly Esplin’s—a ghost, a chimera, bubbling up from the space where Alloran had fallen silent but Esplin’s mind still held his shape.  It was the contempt of the Visser—the being who was neither Yeerk nor Andalite but something greater than either, a god half-grown and hungry.  Since the moment of his creation he had pushed and prodded, commanded and cajoled—doing everything within his power to force _them_ to grasp their own.

And still they had learned nothing.  Had proven themselves terminally complacent, incurably short-sighted, fundamentally beyond reach.  They had every right and reason to end him, and yet they did not, would not, _could_ not.

He could feel his innermost self shifting as he passed through the corridors, the bodies of Telor parting before him and closing in his wake.  It was as if his soul were rearranging itself, his doubts dissolving and his resolve hardening as a white-hot clarity burned away the dross and chaff, leaving only purpose.

He thought of Seerow.

He thought of Elfangor.

He thought of Aftran.

He thought of the rift, and the bridge, and the unseen hands that had crafted them both.  Of the cube and the Chee, the Leerans and the Arn, the fuel that burned in ten billion suns—profligate waste, the stuff of ten thousand trillion trillion lives vanishing between each heartbeat, and that merely in this one galaxy _._

_I will not let it be._

It was a quiet affirmation, but it took root in every part of him—from his cold disdain to his fear and fury, a single unifying, organizing principle.  The goal had not changed, but _he_ had, in relation _to_ it, the last of his misaligned parts clicking into place.

_If Aftran’s death accomplished nothing else, this alone would be worth it._

Turning a corner, he saw the entrance to Telor’s chamber, a frame of burnished steel at the end of a long, wide corridor.  Thirteen human Controllers stood at active attention along either side, their weapons charged and leveled, their fingers on the triggers—useless theater, since they lacked the necessary intent.

Pausing at the threshold, the Visser focused, stretching his mind until he found purchase, seven small bundles of sensation that had been quietly awaiting his attention.  With the smooth, practiced coordination of a juggler, he divided his thoughts into eight distinct threads, using seven of them to open seven sets of eyes.  He stepped into the chamber, and seven hands opened seven hidden compartments, his seven extra bodies emerging from their hiding places at the exact moment when all of Telor’s attention was focused elsewhere.

‹Aftran is dead,› he said bluntly, broadening his thought-speak to include the seething mass in the center of the pool.  ‹The plan will need to be adjusted.›

As he spoke, he eased the bodies of his sleeper soldiers into position, monitoring each with a different part of his self as he Controlled them like morph constructs through the blank conduit Yeerks in their heads.  Drawing his weapons, he blended in with the other guards around the edges of the chamber, spreading out throughout the crowd.

“ _Adjusted?”_ came the response, a disbelieving shriek launched from many mouths at once.

Approaching the edge of the pool, the Visser looked down with four of his eyes, even as the rest took in the scene from seven different vantage points.

There were thirteen human bodies floating on the surface, draped incongruously over flexible, brightly colored foam cylinders.  Their heads were half-submerged, with only the faces showing, the water barely concealing the thick ropes of Yeerk-flesh connecting at each ear.  Those ropes were moving, he knew, though from this distance he couldn’t really see it—a constant flow through the host brains, into one ear and out of the other, allowing the larger coalescion to sense and respond in something approximating real time.

“ _There is no plan!”_ the chorus of voices cried.  “ _There is nothing left!”_

‹The plan did not depend upon Aftran,› he answered levelly.  ‹There are other cities, other targets.  Silat is growing, and its mating group has already begun to produce.  The rest of our fleet draws near.  This is only a setback.›

He paused, waiting—for Telor to compose its response, for that response to propagate to thirteen mouths through the filter of thirteen brains.  He watched himself from above as the rest of Telor shifted nervously in its army of bodies, shards and slivers and fragments reluctant to speak without the comforting cocoon of consensus.

When it came, the answer was not a hysterical shout, but careful and considered—almost sly.

“ _Council of Thirteen will have questions.  Visser One as well.  Chain of events, reasons.  Only fourth true-death since war began, second under your command.”_

‹Aftran was _already_ dead,› the Visser said pointedly.  ‹The meteor was damage control.›

A pause.

“ _Bandits you failed to catch—”_

‹Dead now.›  Some, at least, had to be.

“ _—and no attempt to save embodied third.  Plus humans now on alert.  Suspicious.  Worth it?”_

Around him, the spectators stiffened as one, their shoulders rubbing up against his auxiliary bodies.  His fingers tightened on their triggers as seven eighths of his mind began prioritizing potential targets.

Some sort of prearranged signal?  A code word?  Or just Controllers reacting to the mood of the conversation?

Nudging one of the bodies toward a private, dimly lit corner, he disconnected from it, reclaiming a line of secondary thought as his primary prepared an answer.

Telor was not a threat in any immediate, meaningful sense—in the worst case, the Visser could seize control of the room, destroy the coalescion, and take the ship by force.  Even if it were to reach out to the Council and turn the larger Yeerk command structure against him, he had the breathing room provided by the rift, and all of the resources of the Earth to draw upon.

That being said, Quat’s experiments had yet to bear fruit, Elfangor’s _Iscafil_ device had likely been destroyed, and most of the Visser’s other schemes were long-odds and speculative.  Currently, he had no better tool for furthering his goals than Telor’s goodwill—

“ _Under what circumstances will you destroy us, too?”_

He froze.  Quick as a tail strike, he reassigned his second line of thought—

‹I could ask the same question of you.›

—to a reassessment of his model of Telor’s reticence.  If it were _not_ simply cowardice and indecision—if the coalescion were fully aware of the threat presented by Visser Three, and had allowed him into the heart of the ship _anyway_ —

 _Sloppy._   He was tired, and making mistakes—taking too many things for granted, failing to update old and outdated assumptions.

Pilots who were Telor had witnessed him Controlling a second body, during the takeover of the school.  No one outside of his private facility was aware that he could handle multiple bodies at once, but Telor might have considered the possibility, and prepared appropriate countermeasures.

The same was true of Quat’s bioweapon, contained within the hidden compartment of the stasis tube—they had no way of knowing what it was or how it functioned, but as it was the only item he was carrying, it was reasonable to assume that they might have a tractor beam trained on it, or a sniper hidden away—

—he began carefully scanning the room with three of his bodies, leaving the other three to keep watch—

 —could they have anticipated Compulsion?  It didn’t seem likely, but even if they had, was there any way to defend against it?

 _Of course,_ scoffed the part of him that had formed around Alloran.  _Robots, drones, gas, shock, sonics—anything that destroys or disables your brain will do the trick—_

In front of him, the water heaved and broke, a writhing mass of Yeerk-flesh rising from the depths.  Atop it was a single human body—one of the thirteen mouthparts—her dark, wet hair blending eerily with the web of black veins that branched across the glistening surface.  The coalescion formed around her like a throne, the thick ropes disconnecting from her ears as she pushed herself up to a sitting position.

“We know you’ve considered it,” the woman said, ignoring his previous comment.  “Have you planned it already?  Is there another meteor out there with ‘Telor’ written on it?”

She dropped her eyes pointedly, her gaze flickering down to the cylinder in his hand before returning to level.

_Updated hypothesis: fatalism, not confidence._

Nothing to lose, and therefore no attempt to defend.

Disdain.

‹No,› he said bluntly, returning directness for directness in accordance with a vague instinct.  ‹I had neither the desire nor the intention to kill Aftran.  I simply prepared for the possibility, and did not allow the cost to loom larger than it truly was.›

“How large was it?”

He hesitated, and she pressed forward.  “Surely you’ve quantified it, no?  Otherwise you’re just exchanging a protective bias for a dismissive one.”  She gestured at the pool around her, at the mass of Telor supporting her.  “How much, Esplin nine-four-double-six?  What would you trade my life— _our_ lives—for?  What did you purchase with Aftran’s?”

He turned his stalk eyes backward, to the door, knowing that the woman would see it, and wonder—turned the stasis cylinder over in his hands, let his tail blade rise and sway.  He imagined the conversation running forward in half a dozen ways, selected what seemed to be the most likely path, and skipped ahead.

‹No general can guarantee the safety of every soldier,› he said.

“A general should _try,”_ Telor’s mouthpiece countered.  “The meteor took over an hour to travel.  You gave us _two minutes_ of warning.”

‹If I had given you more, and yet commanded you not to rescue any shard of Aftran, would you have obeyed?  If I had told you not to communicate with her in any way?›

“If you had explained _why_ —”

‹No.  I do not have the _time_ to provide answers, nor the patience for your second-guessing.  I provide _victory_ —that will have to be explanation enough.›

“What good is victory if we do not live to see it?  Had you preserved so much as a single shard—”

‹You assume that because _you_ do not understand the reason, no good reason can exist,› he interrupted.  ‹The Council placed me in command over you—did so in spite of their misgivings.›

“That was before you murdered one of our own.  Unnecessarily, without warning or mercy.  Your bargain with us was clear—our obedience in exchange for proliferation.  There is no point to obedience if we must live in fear of extinction.”

 _Ah.  Now we get to the true crux of the matter._   ‹Aftran was compromised in more ways than one,› he said.  ‹There is a reason I kept you quarantined from her once she began taking human hosts.  She lost more in Silat than she expected, and with what was left—she was beginning to allow the humans to— _influence_ her.›

“As you allowed Alloran to influence you?” she shot back.

‹Yes,› he answered simply, letting the word hang in the air between them.  He watched as the woman’s brow furrowed, as thought showed visibly on her face.  _Exactly like that, Telor.  You mistrust and fear me, because I am no longer fully one of you.  Imagine how much worse it would be—seven billion traitors, more human than Yeerk._

It was only half of the truth—in the beginning, his quarantine of Aftran had been more about morale and strategy than about memetic contamination.  Every Yeerk knew the value of exchange between pools—the diversification of genetic material, the propagation of knowledge and experience.  What they did _not_ know—because no pool had lived in isolation since the compact, because the results of Seerow’s experiments had been for Andalite eyes only—was that a lone coalescion underwent significant hormonal and chemical changes, becoming progressively more aggressive, stochastic, and expansionist.

In Aftran’s case, the siphoning-off of Silat had confounded the effect, mutating it into her strange predilection for curiosity and cooperation.  But Telor had simply fallen prey to it—was unwittingly primed for violent action, desperate gambles, radical change.  It would do _anything_ to find another pool to mingle with, without ever realizing that that was the true root of its impulsiveness, its urgency.

And as long as it never actually found one—

‹We would benefit from a truce,› the Visser declared.  ‹An understanding.  It would be far easier for me to achieve victory with the willing help of Telor—both on the surface of Earth and in communications with the Council.  And _you_ cannot achieve victory without _me_ at all—I will kill you if you threaten me, and only I can deliver the planet to you complete and intact.›

He paused, allowing the words to sink in, waiting to see how Telor would choose to respond—

“Word from the surface!”

Both the Visser and the woman turned toward a corner of the chamber, where a human Controller was straightening up from a panel, the color draining from her face.  “The Bug fighter sent to secure Jeremiah Poznanski—the analyst from the anomalous meeting—”

‹What’s this?› the Visser demanded.

“—it’s crashed.  Crashed in public, out in the open, outside Washington, D.C.”

‹ _What is—_ ›

“There was a strange meeting with President Tyagi,” the woman in the pool said hastily, her words tumbling over one another.  “A member of the Secret Service, holding a long conversation in almost total silence.  We thought—perhaps an Andalite bandit, communicating in thought-speak—”

‹Jeremiah Poznanski—›

“Called in halfway through the meeting.  We didn’t know why, sent a Bug fighter to take him when he returned home—but he’s not home yet, he’s still _there,_ with the President, we don’t know what—”

The Visser cursed silently in his head.  Of course— _of course_ this would happen now, at the moment of peak suspicion, when Telor would be most reluctant to keep him informed, ask his advice, seek approval of its plans—

—unless this was an opportunity for _him._   A timely coincidence, to remind Telor of exactly why it needed him, why it could not succeed without him—

‹The Secretary of State,› he said flatly.

“Contacting now,” the woman at the console said, and the Visser thought he could detect the tiniest shade of relief in her tone.

He turned his eyes back to the woman in the pool, noting that twin ropes of Yeerk-flesh had once again attached themselves to both of her ears.  Telor had resumed direct control, apparently no longer willing to trade clarity for immediacy.

‹It seems you have a decision to make, Telor,› he said, straightening his shoulders and lashing his tail.  ‹Do you accept my command, or not?›

The silence stretched, taut almost to the point of breaking.  Around the chamber, the rest of the Controllers stood stock-still, waiting with bated breath.  With delicate care, the Visser disconnected from his other six bodies and focused, preparing—if necessary—to seize control of the entire room.

“ _There is more to discuss,”_ came the chorus of voices, as the throne of flesh sank back beneath the waves.  “ _We need—”_

‹Do you accept my command, or not?›

A false dichotomy, a coercive choice.  It would not last for long.

But for the immediate future—

“ _Yes, Visser.  We accept your command.”_

 


	27. Chapter 22: Tobias

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: Breaking the chapter order, probably for good (though I'll endeavor not to give any one character more than two chapters per arc, as I like the story to remain balanced). One benefit is that storylines can progress more naturally even with a "split party;" another is that various spoilers will be harder to spot simply by looking at the lineup.
> 
> That being said, there's some chance that the right move for two weeks from now is Tobias, Part II. Either that or Jake. Vote now on your phones!

 

**Chapter 22: Tobias**

_Not in control, never in control._

I rose on borrowed wings, fighting for altitude as I flapped upward through the dust and haze toward the clear, blue sky. The wreckage was close and tight around me, and I felt a tug as I came too close to a snarl of twisted metal and lost several russet tail feathers.

I reached open air just as the squad cars and fire engines pulled up. There were maybe twenty people scattered in a wide circle around Jeremiah’s house, with more making their way closer across lawns and down the street. Two men were already inside, climbing gingerly over the wreckage and debris—if they had been thirty seconds faster, they would have caught me mid-morph.

_How long has it been?_

Three minutes? Four? I had finished demorphing, the ship had crashed, I had dealt with my wound and the remaining Controllers, I had stunned the kid, I had killed maybe another minute trying to decide what to do, I had remorphed—

Five minutes. At least.

How quickly would the Yeerks respond? They were almost certainly already on their way—how long would it take for them to get here from California?

_Or from orbit. Or from somewhere else in D.C._

I had seconds. Maybe— _maybe_ —minutes.

_Okay, options._

I looked down at the scene below. The police and firefighters had fanned out, establishing a perimeter with cones and yellow tape, but it wasn’t like that stopped anyone from _looking._ The situation was undeniable, obvious—it was, unmistakably, a spaceship crashed into a house. I saw at least fifteen phones held up, taking pictures and video, and in the distance I could see a news van, maybe a mile and a half away.

Would Visser Three try to blow everything up? _Could_ he, at this point, without giving the game away?

_Might be worth it anyway, if the alternative is letting the U.S. government get their hands on Bug fighter technology—_

I shook my head, scanning the horizon as I continued to spiral upward. _Actions, not speculation. Thirty seconds._

Visser Three. He would glass the neighborhood, or kill the internet, or try some kind of coverup, or just open up with all-out warfare. And he knew I was here, or would guess that _somebody_ was here—it would be too much of a coincidence for a Bug fighter to crash, on accident, at Jeremiah Poznanski’s house, one day after the destruction of the Yeerk pool.

He would expect me to—what?

I could—

I could—

 _Get away and hide,_ said Garrett’s voice in my head. _Save the kid and the cube, wait and see how he reacts. Or go public right now, tell everyone to take as many photos as they can and put them all on the internet in case Visser Three tries something. Or try to stop everybody down there, distract them or knock them out or something, so that it doesn’t blow up into something the Yeerks HAVE to respond to. Or go straight back to Washington and try to find Paul Evans. Or—_

_Ten seconds. Decide._

Visser Three knew I was here, which meant he would predict what I was going to do, and use that to do something else, except that I knew that, which meant I should—what?

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know, and the clock was ticking, and any second now they might just blow everything up, taking me and the kid and the cube along with it, and I was out in the open, alone, exposed—

I froze, stalling in the air for a heart-stopping moment before I resumed flapping.

Alone.

I wasn’t alone.

Wheeling, I scanned the nearby houses, searching desperately through the windows with the hawk’s piercing, phenomenal vision. This looked like a quiet neighborhood, with lots of retirees. Maybe, just maybe—

Yes.

There.

I folded my wings and dove, mentally bracing myself. My head—above all, I would need to protect my head. As long as I didn’t die on impact, I would be able to heal any other injuries by demorphing—

At the last second, I reversed in midair, bringing my talons forward as if striking at a mouse or a squirrel, covering my face with my wings.

_Crash._

I almost passed out from the pain—shocking, all-consuming pain. Despite its four-foot wingspan, the hawk body barely weighed two and a half pounds, all hollow bones and delicate muscle, and I had hit the glass of the second-story window _hard._ I was bleeding in at least a dozen places, and it felt like there wasn’t a single unbroken bone left in my legs, wings, or chest.

_Seven minutes, give or take._

I began to demorph, not bothering to wait to see if anyone would come running from inside the house. Slowly—agonizingly—my bones knitted themselves back together, the pain fading as my feathers melted and became skin, as my left wing swelled and thickened into the body of Jeremiah’s son.

Ignoring the fragments of wood and glass, I straightened and stood before the morph was complete, dragging the still-attached kid with me as I staggered toward the cordless phone on the nightstand. With each step, pain radiated up my right forearm, and I felt a wave of horror and nausea as I caught sight of the charred stump.

_At least it’s not gushing blood._

Looking away, I waited until my left hand solidified, differentiated, my skin separating from the shirt of the unconscious boy. Lifting the phone out of its cradle, I dialed with my thumb and held it up to my mostly-human ear.

“Hello?”

“Rictic,” I said, my voice a gravelly croak as my throat finished rearranging itself. “Tobias. Where are you? Can you get away?”

“Still shadowing Poznanski. He’s in the next room, with President Tyagi.”

_President Paul Evans, actually—_

Later. “How fast can you get to Poznanski’s house?”

A tiny pause, just barely long enough to be chilling. “Four minutes, if I’m careful,” the android said levelly. “Ninety seconds, if I’m not.”

“I shot down a Bug fighter. Almost ten minutes ago. It’s out in the open, maybe a hundred witnesses. Visser Three—”

“On my way.”

The line went dead, and I sucked in a breath.

_Now the cube._

I looked over at the kid—David—lying motionless by the window.

_No time._

Down the stairs, out the door, down the street, moaning through gritted teeth with every jarring step as I counted in my head— _seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty_. Rounding a corner, I sprinted for the house where I had left the bag—tore open the crawlspace door—scrambled inside awkwardly on three limbs.

_Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven—_

Crawling back out, I retraced my steps, my lungs burning as the bookbag bounced up and down on my back. The sirens had faded, giving way to the rhythmic drone of approaching helicopters, and as I headed back toward David I caught a glimpse of a black plastic at the end of the street, some kind of privacy barrier that the police were erecting.

_One minute twelve, one minute thirteen—_

Calling in Rictic was _probably_ a good move. The doglike android was incredibly powerful—faster than a bullet, with force fields and holograms and the ability to communicate directly with the rest of the Chee. If the Yeerks tried anything violent—

— _anything short of another asteroid, that is—_

—he would make a huge difference. But he’d intervene just as readily if _I_ tried anything violent, too. Which meant that—for better or worse—I’d just committed us to a containment strategy.

Would Visser Three anticipate that? And if he did, what would he do in response?

_One minute twenty-four, one minute twenty-five—_

I burst back in through the front door and was halfway up the stairs when exhaustion and blood loss finally caught up to me, my vision narrowing and darkening as my body tried to faint. I stumbled—staggered—slammed one knee into the corner of a stair and barely managed to forestall the reflex to catch myself with the right hand I no longer had.

_No—_

I felt my grip on reality turn soft and slippery, the bookbag slipping from my shoulder as my muscles turned to water. I was flattening, collapsing, sliding—

_NO—_

My vision shrank down to a pinhole as the darkness closed in, all the blood draining out of my brain and into my torso. With my last shred of consciousness, I raised my right arm above my head and swung it down onto the nearest step.

It wasn’t even that hard—barely more than the force of gravity—but the throbbing pain that had been lurking in the background tripled—quadrupled—flared into brilliance like a lightning strike, burning away the fog and lethargy. Turning my head, I threw up, the liquid trickling down beside me as I slid another couple of steps.

_Get._

_UP._

Weak and shaking, my heart still pounding, I began crawling up the staircase, not bothering to try to stand upright. I had to get to the top of the stairs because—

—because—

I threw up again, this time unable to avoid getting it all over myself. I was fading fast, needed to get into morph—

_Not yet!_

—because—

Right. The kid. David.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I rose up to my knees, skidding across the carpet while I braced myself against the wall with my left hand. I felt a trickling, dripping sensation on my right side, and decided not to look.

_Twelve minutes. Maybe thirteen._

Stay, or go?

With Rictic coming, it was a lot less dangerous to stay. Even if Visser Three _did_ have another asteroid, it would take at least another thirty minutes for it to get here. And here was where all the attention was—if the Yeerks were going to make any effort at all to maintain the charade, then they were more constrained here than anywhere else.

 _Not the hawk, then,_ I thought, as I rolled over onto my back next to David’s prone figure. Probably not any animal—most of my morphs were good for fighting and escaping, not infiltrating crowds.

Human, then. I had upwards of a hundred different options to choose from, thanks to the past few weeks. I glanced down at my clothes—sweaty, bloodstained, caked with dust and vomit.

_Closet._

Fighting the dizziness, I rose up to my knees once more, waddling over to the sliding, mirrored door. Pushing it aside, I breathed a sigh of relief at the rack of entirely-normal-sized shirts and pants.

_Paul Evans._

Physically fit, nondescript, and possessed of a large amount of training and expertise. Shucking the bag—I wanted the shredder both readily available and readily hidden—I grabbed the cube in my left hand and rested my forearm across David’s calf.

 _Here goes,_ I thought.

Hawk to human, human to human—Poznanski—then back to my own body, back to hawk, and back to my own body yet again, all within the past half hour. There was a good chance this would be my last morph any time soon, which meant I had a little over two hours—

— _no, make that like an hour and ten minutes, once you add in David’s weight—_

—to get somewhere where I could rest and recover and get treatment for my arm.

 _You know, you actually might not make it out of this one_ , a voice in my head began, but it was quickly drowned out by another:

_We’ll just do the next thing, and the next, and the next. We’ll keep on trying until we figure out a way. Because we aren’t the type of people who back down._

_You’d better be alive, Garrett,_ I thought, as David and the cube and my own battered, broken body all disappeared, consumed by the athletic, thirtyish figure of Paul Evans.

And then—

“Tobias! There you are.”

I jerked violently on the floor, the changes sputtering to a halt as I lost concentration. Behind me, the air rippled and split, and Rictic’s human form appeared, standing in the doorway of the bedroom.

“What—” I began, but the android cut me off.

“Morph signature,” he said. “Couldn’t locate you until a few seconds ago.”

Gritting my teeth, I refocused, feeling the morph slowly grind into motion again. “What’s going on outside?”

“Nothing yet, but there’s a Bug fighter on approach. Cloaked, going slow—I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been doing a close scan on the approach vector from the moon. We’ve got maybe three minutes before it’s here, maybe two before it’s in firing range.”

“Can you—you know— _do_ something about it?”

“Not unless you can prove it’s unmanned. I can probably block any shots it makes, until it gets close enough that I can’t maneuver in front of them.”

I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “Are there any _other_ ones out there? Ones that you wouldn’t have noticed because you didn’t do a close scan on their attack vector or whatever?”

“Maybe. Nothing in the sky right now, though.”

“I heard helicopters earlier.”

“Cleared out. I left a note for Poznanski and Tyagi before I split. They got on the phone to the Air Force right before the Air Force was about to call _them._ And Homeland Security is on their way to take over from the local PD.”

My morph complete, I stood and strode over to the closet, quickly pulling on a loose-fitting tracksuit. “It’s been—what—fifteen minutes, since the thing crashed?”

“Maybe more. Some of us are tracking this on the internet, and the first images and descriptions went up fourteen minutes and thirty six seconds ago.”

“So it’s out?”

“Kind of. There are pictures on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook. Major news has only reported ‘damage to houses in a local neighborhood, possibly from a crashed aircraft.’”

I took in another deep breath as I pulled on some socks and grabbed a pair of loafers out of the shoe rack. So the Yeerks hadn’t killed communication—hadn’t shot down any satellites or cut any internet cables.

Was that good? Or bad?

I straightened up, slipping the shredder into the bookbag and slinging it over my shoulder. “Can you get us out to the perimeter? Whichever side the Bug fighter’s coming in on?”

“Yeah. Brace yourself.”

I felt the same tightening of the air that I had that first night, so long ago, when Elfangor had pinned me and Marco with a force field. Rictic’s true form became visible as it stretched its hologram to include me, and then we were _moving._

Maybe three seconds later, the air softened, and the world around me stopped spinning. “Don’t go anywhere,” Rictic said. “You’re inside the hologram, but you won’t be if you take two steps.”

I nodded. “ETA?”

“Eighty seconds, at current speed. Twenty, for firing range.”

“If they fire—”

“If they fire, the fact that you suddenly appeared out of thin air is going to be the _last_ thing anybody pays attention to.”

I nodded again, feeling my heart start to race. _Ten seconds._

_Nine._

_Eight._

Around us, the crowd milled and murmured, a press of people all craning their necks, lifting their phones and cameras, struggling to see past the tall, black curtain of plastic the police had erected.

_Five._

_Four._

I felt a sudden urge to draw the shredder—to feel it in my hand, to _not_ stand there with a resource untapped, to maybe get gunned down like—like a _sheep,_ after everything that had already happened—

_One._

_Zero._

I waited.

_One._

_Two._

_Three._

_Nothing, you’re doing_ nothing, _Tobias, you’re just sitting here while Visser Three moves his pieces into position, you’re playing right into his hands—_

“Rictic—” I began.

“Within range. Weapons aren’t drawing any power.”

“What—”

And then, with an anticlimactic suddenness, the Bug fighter’s cloaking field dropped, and it was visible in the sky, a brown shape about as large as a pea held out at arm’s length.

“Reading radio chatter,” Rictic murmured. “Air traffic control’s picked up on it, relaying to Air Force and the White House.” It paused. “They’re calling for identification and statement of purpose on a wide range of channels.”

“Rictic,” I breathed. “Can you—could you take it down? Could you bring it down now, without hurting anyone inside?”

The android turned, various parts near its top sliding and rotating and whirring around. “No,” it said finally. “I could damage its weaponry, but—no, that doesn’t work either, since if they intend to fire on a particular target, damaging the guns could cause them to decide to use the ship itself as a weapon.  I can block most or all of the shots, if they fire—better to leave them thinking that's their best option.”

Around us, the people had begun to notice, a rustle of apprehension sweeping across the crowd as fingers pointed and phones and cameras turned toward a new subject. The ship was coming in smoothly, stately, at a speed that practically screamed _diplomatic parade._ A high drone swelled and cut through the babble of conversation, the sound of helicopters approaching at high speed—two of them stopped almost directly above us, side by side, while six others spread out on either side of the Bug fighter’s line of approach.

_Move._

“Rictic—”

“Yeah. What about that house over there?”

It pointed. It was one of those brick McMansions, three stories high and with way more glass than any suburban house needed. It was three lots down from Poznanski’s, forward and off to one side.

“Yeah,” I said, and the air tightened around me once again.

Rictic took its time, this time, presumably to avoid notice from either the crowd, the helicopters, or the Bug fighter’s sensors. There was one brief moment of extreme acceleration, and then I was perched on the ridge, the field relaxing around me.

“I need to be in a different position, if I’m going to intercept fire,” Rictic said, its simulated voice taking on an urgent tone. “Are you all right here?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Can you—I mean, are you really going to be able to—”

“There are five other Chee on the way,” it said. “They should be here within ten minutes. Until then—”

It shrugged, the chrome-and-ivory plates of his robot body shifting smoothly past one another. Then it vanished, the hologram contracting to cover it as it stepped off the roof.

 _Visser Three knows about the Chee,_ I remembered suddenly. Enough to at least posit that they might be nearby, might show up under such circumstances.

‹Rictic,› I broadcast, keeping the band of my thoughts narrow. ‹Have you considered the possibility of a trap?›

There was no answer, of course. The android might circle back around to me if it made tactical sense, but in the moment—

The Bug fighter was now enormous in the sky, longer than a school bus and more than twice as thick, its two serrated gun emplacements the size of flagpoles. It had slowed, and came to a full stop as I watched, hovering directly over the center of the street maybe twenty or thirty feet higher than my vantage point on the rooftop. Holding almost unnervingly level, it began to descend, dropping toward the street with graceful slowness.

If the helicopters were attempting to communicate with it, they were doing so via radio rather than any kind of loudspeaker. They swooped in as the police moved to hold back the crowd, two of them dropping neatly onto either side of the fighter’s position while the other four continued to circle the scene.

I could feel my heart hammering in my chest, the pent-up tension of inaction, of frustrated helplessness. There were too many unknowns, too many ways for the situation to go sideways. I knew I needed to do _something—_ that in the future I’d look back to this moment and wish I had acted—but I didn’t know _what._

 _You shouldn’t have called Rictic,_ a part of me accused. _Now you can’t even shoot._

But surely Visser Three wouldn’t expect _that_ , right? Wouldn’t expect his opponents to be _un_ able to cause trouble, in a situation like this? If the goal was to be unpredictable, then maybe I was _already_ disrupting the plan—

_Wishful thinking._

I clenched my fist. If I was literally going to do _nothing,_ then I should leave—get the cube out of danger, get to Paul or to Jake or just get out of the line of fire—

A hatch near the front of the Bug fighter slid open with a _hiss_ of compressed air, and an object billowed forth, expanding like an airbag before fluttering down to hang limply over the nose—

_A white flag?_

Suddenly, a voice filled my thoughts.

‹Human resistance fighter,› the voice said. ‹Friend and ally of Elfangor—I know you are out there. Your name is Tobias, if my guess is correct. Tobias, or perhaps Rachel, or perhaps simply a friend of one of them, or of Jake or Cassie or Marco.›

I froze.

I had heard that voice before, once. It was my own, of course, as thought-speak always was. But the tone. The cadence. The utter, absolute confidence, the only Controller in the galaxy with access to thought-speak—

This was the voice that had laughed as Elfangor died.

‹I wish to emerge from my ship. To speak to the humans gathered before me, and to you as well. I would— _appreciate_ —your clemency. It would be inconvenient to be shot, or mauled, or otherwise abused, as you are no doubt capable of causing or preventing, as you please.›

‹Rictic—›

‹If I must, I will take your silence as answer, though I would prefer a positive affirmation.›

‹Rictic, I think that’s Visser Three inside the ship. Whoever it is, they’re—they’re thought-speaking at me.›

I could feel myself panicking, feel the uncertainty and tension threatening to mutate into a full-blown meltdown. This was it, this was Visser Three’s plan, it was unfolding _right now_ and I still didn’t know which actions would fulfill his expectations and which would violate them—

And then it clicked. Fell into place like the first shovelful of dirt on a coffin, the realization dark and heavy with despair.

There weren’t _any_ actions that would violate his expectations. He’d _chosen_ this battlefield, had come prepared for every eventuality, was ready for me to fight or fly or freeze, had contingency plans for anything I might think to do.

 _Unless he’s bluffing,_ insisted a quiet, determined voice inside of me. _Unless that’s exactly the feeling he’s trying to get you to feel, exactly the kind of thought he’s trying to get you to think._

‹Very well, then. I will emerge in approximately fifty of your seconds. If you are willing—if neither you nor the other humans decide to fire upon me—I would appreciate speaking with you directly, after.›

 _And even if he_ has _prepared for everything, that doesn’t mean you just roll over and let him win. Don’t give up the gunfight without at least making him waste some bullets._

‹Rictic,› I said again, my mental voice mercifully steady. ‹He’s opening the door in about forty seconds and coming out. If there’s gas, or some kind of hidden weapon—›

Rictic would position himself between the ship and the crowd of humans—would wait, invisible, for any sign of violence. Looking down off the roof, I weighed the landscape. I was off to the side, nearly ninety degrees away from the path of any kind of straightforward fire. And it was unlikely that the Bug fighter was about to explode, first because it contained _Visser fucking Three_ , but also because—

What would be the point? If he wanted to nuke the site, he could’ve done that from orbit.

Then again, if he wanted to talk to humanity, he could’ve done _that_ from orbit, too.

_So why bother—_

I tried to clear my head, to think in terms of actions and consequences, cause and effect—physics, not magic.

There were a couple hundred humans down below.

There were eight helicopters, and higher up and farther out, probably fighter jets and—by now—at least one nuke.

There were cameras—dozens of them, at least some of which were probably streaming directly to the cloud.

There was _not_ any obvious spokesperson for humankind—no Presidents or billionaires, no one visibly high-ranking. Just some cops, some firefighters, some neighbors, and maybe a few Homeland Security agents.

 _—trying to lure me out? Make_ me _the spokesperson—_

And in the middle of it all, next to the ruin of Jeremiah Poznanski’s house, was a Bug fighter containing the leader of the Yeerk invasion.

 _Well, when you put it_ that _way—_

It was a publicity stunt. It was PR—we’d dragged the war out into the open, and now Visser Three was here to make some kind of impression on the human race.

_He’s either going to kill everybody or try to make himself look good. If I just shoot him—shoot him right away, the second he steps out onto the ramp—_

It was tempting. But—

No one would understand. It would be like going back in time and killing Hitler in 1920. It would only make him seem _more_ sympathetic, in the long run.

_And it wouldn’t even kill him. What he just said—about shooting him being inconvenient—this probably isn’t even really him, it’s one of his decoys, his remote-control bodies, like the boy Rachel killed—_

But it had thought-speak, which meant—

_Damn!_

He’d been in thought-speak range for over a minute and a half by now. Plenty of time to have already started, to have delivered a full telepathic speech already—

‹Rictic, are you picking up any kind of thought-speak broadcast from him? If so—um—give me some kind of sign.›

I squinted down at the crowd. They weren’t obviously listening, but neither were they obviously _not_ listening. They were riveted, one and all, on the spaceship in front of them.

 _You’ve got about three seconds,_ a part of me observed.

What could I do—what could I say, that would work equally well regardless of whether he was here to intimidate or impress, whether he’d already been talking or not—

There was another hiss, and a series of cracks appeared in what had seemed to be seamless metal, cold gas escaping as plates shifted and a ramp began to lower.

‹Remember,› I broadcast, holding only a single bubble of silence for the ship and its crew. ‹Sometimes the smooth-talking guy who has an answer for everything turns out to be a mass-murdering sociopath.›

I could see the effect the words had on the crowd, a sort of collective swelling as everyone took in a breath at the same time. Most of them, I imagined, thought they’d generated the words on their own. Only a scattered fraction seemed to be looking around, searching for the source of the telepathic voice.

 _All right. Some evidence that he_ wasn’t _talking to them all along._

Somehow, that helped—eased my sense that Visser Three had thought of everything, that there was nothing I could do.

 _I can at least make the bastard_ work _for it._

The ramp touched the ground with the same dignified grace that had characterized the whole charade. The crowd seemed to lean forward, craning, and then—with delicate, careful steps—

I couldn’t help it. I leaned forward, too, my eyes wide.

It wasn’t _quite_ an Andalite. Wasn’t really like an Andalite at all, actually—it had the same six limbs, the same four eyes, the same long, lethal tail, but they bore only the loosest, sketchiest resemblance to the real thing, as different as a real human was from a stick figure.

It was shaped like a centaur, only the lower half was a deer instead of a horse—a lithe, blue body with long, tapered legs, muscled like a marble statue. There was no seam where the lower body ended and the upper began, just smooth curves of rippling blue fur. The upper half was somehow more than human—like a stylized drawing, with a bas-relief eight-pack of abs and wide, sweeping pecs. The arms were overlong, each maybe a full meter from shoulder to fingers, and the hands were slender and fragile-looking, with seven fingers but only one thumb.

And the head—

Ax and Elfangor hadn’t really had _heads_ so much as places where their bodies simply ended. They ate through their feet, after all, and their stalk eyes pretty much eliminated the need for a neck capable of twisting and bending.

But this—

It was elegant and narrow, like an inverted teardrop, the classic _little green man_ shape. The two stalk eyes were smaller, the cords of muscle almost twice as long as Ax’s, and the main eyes were larger and almond-shaped, close-set between a pair of pointed, elfin ears. The nose was a barely noticeable bulge, split by three vertical nostrils, and the mouth was small and thin-lipped, almost invisible above the angular, elegant chin.

It was like an Andalite, if Andalites had been specifically designed to appeal to human sensibilities. Everything about it spoke of dignity, of nobility, a subtle mix of sophistication and strength. It was like something out of Camelot, or an ancient Greek legend—a Centaur with a capital C.

And it knew, I could see. Was doing it on purpose—was moving slowly, softly, like a ballet dancer or a runway model, twisting subtly with each step in a way that made it seem somehow more than three dimensional, that allowed each observer to see more than their fair share of detail.

It was showing off, but quietly—so quietly that I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it. Elegance, not flashiness.

 _You are clumsy,_ the alien body said. _Unrefined. Inferior. Primitive and ugly._

It stopped at the bottom of the ramp, just beyond the shadow cast by the Bug fighter’s nose, its blue fur shimmering in the afternoon light. It raised its hands slowly, palms up and fingers wide in an open, expansive gesture.

“Humans,” it said gravely, its voice deep and sonorant and undeniably male. “My name is Esplin.”

There was a collective sigh, the release of the breath they’d all taken in together a moment earlier, and I could tell my words had failed—that more than half of them were already entranced.

“You have questions,” it said, its voice somehow carrying even out to the rooftop where I was standing, seeming measured and soft even as it competed with the sound of the helicopters overhead. “And you will receive answers. But they will have to wait, for I am here to confess, and apologize, and atone, and it is important that all of humanity has a chance to hear what I have to say.”

 _Shoot him. Shoot him NOW_ , said the part of my brain that understood patterns, that ignored costs, that made me spit in bullies’ faces. I looked down at my hands, noticed that they had pulled the shredder out of the bag without my conscious approval.

But I was too far away, and also there was Rictic, and also the damage had already been done, he was already someone they wanted to listen to—

 _Yeah, but it’s gonna get a whole lot_ worse _if he gets to just say whatever he wants—_

‹Okay, this is already sounding pretty manipulative,› I broadcast, hoping desperately to weaken the spell, to mar the performance, like a cell phone going off during a movie. ‹Like, campaign-speech level smarmy.›

I couldn’t tell if it made any difference.

“Yesterday,” he continued, “a meteor struck Ventura county, killing some six hundred thousand people. Fathers, mothers, children. Citizens. An entire city wiped off the map—the largest single disaster in recorded human history.”

He paused, and once again the entire crowd seemed to breathe as one.

“It was no accident. It was a war crime, executed on my orders and carried out by my subordinates.”

The silence was deafening, absolute, shocked.

_What—_

_Why—_

“You see, we came not in peace, but in war—as conquerors, thinking to take from you your land, your resources, your very bodies. In foolish, arrogant ignorance, we imagined that your lives were meaningless, your wants and dreams irrelevant—that because we had the _might_ to rule over you, we also had the _right.”_

He lowered his hands, his shoulders and tail slumping gently. “We were wrong,” he said flatly. “I say this too late, knowing it to be too little. I say it, not as an excuse, but as an explanation, so that you may understand what has happened, and decide what happens next. We learned of your personhood—your _humanity_ —only after we had already grievously violated it.”

He paused, burying his face in his hands for a moment, his stalk eyes peering out over his fourteen slender fingers. “We came to your planet three months ago,” he explained. “Landed, in secret, in Ventura—seized a building in the center of town—began to spread quietly, inch by inch. My species is symbiotic, you see—the body before you is an animal, no more intelligent than a cow. These words are coming to you from a _Yeerk,_ living inside this body’s skull. In my natural state, I am deaf, blind, and mute—a helpless slug, swimming in stagnant water. In order to see and experience the world, we must take a host—crawl into its ear and share its thoughts, its senses, its experience.”

He lowered his hands. “We took the city of Ventura,” he said bluntly. “Enslaved its people, and used their bodies to capture others. It was the first step in a larger campaign to enslave your entire species, along with the lesser species beneath you—to take your planet as our own. On my world, this is the right and natural way of things—there are no other intelligent species, and by grabbing the reins of control, we do not cost anyone anything. Indeed, the creatures we bond with often live longer, healthier, happier lives, thanks to our care.”

I watched, my jaw hanging loose and open, as the crowd shifted uncertainly, as the men and women in uniform looked uncertainly at one another, no one daring to take the initiative.

_Shoot. Him._

But I couldn’t. I was just as hooked as the rest of them, had to understand _why—_ why he was telling _this_ story, what could _possibly_ be in it for him—

“Only once had we ever encountered another truly sapient race—the Andalites, who came to our world with miraculous technology and infinite knowledge, and then denied us the right to learn, to share, to grow. They chained us to our mud puddles while they roamed freely through the stars, and when we finally broke free of their control, we stole from them everything we could.”

On a cross street on the opposite side of the scene, a black SUV pulled up, came screeching to a halt. A man dressed in a formal suit leapt out, began to push through the crowd—

“And so we learned that there are only two kinds of creatures—those lesser than us, whom we would rule, and those greater than us, whom we must fight lest _they_ rule _us._ I beg, not for your forgiveness, but for your understanding—not ten years have passed since we first realized we were not alone in the universe, and as we spread from star to star, the pattern held true. Everywhere we went, we found either conquest or conflict, and it never occurred to us that this was a _choice_ —that there could be a path to peace that did not require subjugation.”

—the man broke through the cordon, flashed a badge at the assembled cops, strode out into the open space between the Visser and the crowd—

—and froze in mid-step as the alien lifted a finger. Actually froze, his eyes wide, his mouth half-open, every muscle taut and thrumming.

The rest of the crowd sucked in a breath. The Visser raised his head, his body ramrod straight, all four eyes looking past the petrified agent and into the center of the mass of humanity. “Until Earth,” he said softly. “Until Ventura. We were slow to learn, these past three months, but we _did_ learn. We came as we had come to a dozen other worlds, thinking of you as tools, as mere animals—thinking that your culture was only make-work, emergent behavior, like the dancing of bees and the hives of termites. We took thousands of you, in secret, and we would have taken thousands more, but you proved yourself to us—proved that you had souls, and that what we had done was an abomination.”

Still holding one hand up to the agent, he gestured vaguely into the crowd with the other. “We had discovered our mistake, and were preparing to rectify it—to begin an orderly retreat, opening negotiations with your leadership and returning Ventura to its rightful owners. But then—”

He hesitated, his shoulders visibly rising as he took in a breath, then slumping again as he released it. “You had defenders,” he said softly. “They were teenagers—children, really, not even halfway through high school, but they shouldered the burden of resistance, battling with brilliance and tenacity. We do not know how they came to be aware of our invasion, but they fought tirelessly on your behalf, and yesterday—unaware of our decision, unaware that we had realized our crime—they penetrated our stronghold, and destroyed it, triggering a dead-man’s switch.”

Turning his whole head, he looked directly at the frozen agent, seeming to take in every inch of him. Slowly, smoothly, he lowered his hand, and the man’s body relaxed, collapsing like a puppet on the asphalt, where it stayed and did not move.

“The Andalites continue to hound us, you see. They pursue us everywhere we go, and so we have made it a law that we never leave resources behind. If a colony is destroyed for any reason, an automatic process triggers a—”

He broke off. “A _cleansing,_ ” he said carefully, pronouncing the word as if it had edges capable of cutting. “To ensure that our enemies do not profit from what we have built. That they do not learn from our discoveries, as they refused to let us learn from theirs. The vengeance intended for our Andalite persecutors fell upon Ventura, called down by accident—by the very same humans whose bravery had helped to open our eyes to the truth.”

I was astonished. Dumbfounded. Speechless. I felt my thoughts spinning, skidding, felt myself veering between outrage and doubt.

_Lies!_

But—

 _Lies! He dropped the asteroid_ himself— _dropped it on_ purpose.

Except—

The only evidence I had for that was the word of a strange god-creature who had put my little brother in mortal danger just to _set a mood—_

That, and the word of Elfangor, who had come prepared to slaughter every living thing on the surface of the planet.

“It is a tragedy of unthinkable proportions,” the Visser continued, as the rest of the crowd looked on in horrified silence. “A loss that cannot be forgiven, a debt that cannot be repaid, a crime for which we cannot atone. It is a shame my people will bear until the last star burns out—that we carelessly enslaved you, and afterward carelessly murdered you, and all in secrecy and silence, with no defiance given.”

He stepped forward, moving further into the light. “It is in recognition of our debt that I have come, as the former commanding officer of the invasion force, to surrender myself to your justice and retribution. The plan was to land in your capital, but the malfunction of one of our ships—if a malfunction it was, and not the clever doing of yet another daring freedom fighter—has brought me here, instead.”

His stalk eyes swiveled, taking in the crowd, the wreckage, the quivering agent and the hovering helicopters. “I will not live long, myself,” he said, his tone suddenly flat. “A Yeerk must leave its host to feed every three days, swimming in the waters of its pool, and we have fully withdrawn all of our resources from the Earth. I will answer your questions, and then I will starve to death, and humans will once again be the only sapient species on the surface of your planet. My hope is that, in the next three days, I may purchase some small absolution with my suffering.

“The two ships my people leave to you as gifts, along with the technical information you will need both to pilot them and to build more. We are not Andalites, hoarding our knowledge, refusing to share. Should you desire it, you may meet with us again—in five months’ time, in orbit around the moon of Europa. A representative of my people will be waiting there, to negotiate with you the terms of a federation. If you demur, we shall leave you in peace and regret, and hope to meet you someday among the stars, as equals.”

Taking one last sweeping look, he bowed his head, raising his arms in front of him as if to allow himself to be shackled—

—and with that, he pushed me just a little too far, stretched my credulity just a _little_ too thin, and the spell—which had begun to work even on me—broke, the fog disappearing like breath on a cold day.

It was too neat. Too clean, the moral lines drawn with the stark, narrative precision of a con man. And to figure out what a con man wanted, you only had to look at what would _happen_ as a result—

If the Bug fighter really did work—if the plans really were sufficient to make more, using only human-level technology—

Then five months from now, we’d either have a hundred factories cranking them out, or we’d be on our _way_ to having them. Maybe they’d all explode if given the right command, or maybe they all had a secret backdoor that would let the Yeerks take control of them, or maybe they just _worked_ and the Earth would be that much farther along, that much more valuable once the inevitable betrayal finally happened—

I’d been thinking that the Visser would come down to _stop_ us from getting access to Yeerk technology. But I’d had it backwards all along. He didn’t just want _us_ —he wanted our whole goddamn world, the infrastructure necessary to keep seven billion bodies alive and happy, the machinery that had brought us from the Renaissance to the internet and could easily keep us on an upward trajectory for the next thousand years. He was confident that he could take us either way, and so he was putting us on the fast track now—

 _And let’s be honest—if they_ do _work, and then a peaceful meeting happens in five months—how long before the voluntary infestation programs begin? How many people will line up to get themselves a friendly live-in personal assistant—someone to help them lose weight and learn new skills and stay on track? And once all of_ those _people start pulling ahead, thanks to their turbocharged social network, how long before parents start signing their kids up for Yeerk preschool? Before the military starts requiring Yeerk symbiosis for coordination purposes?_

They weren’t going to conquer us the way Cortés had conquered the Aztecs. They were going to conquer us the way we’d conquered East Germany—by making us _want_ to be conquered.

 _And maybe a little Cortés on the side, too, to speed things along. He_ said _they’ve withdrawn fully from the Earth, but they were pulling information out of the White House two hours ago._

Who’s to say they weren’t just lying? That they didn’t just have another pool in Africa somewhere, or that they hadn’t just gone ahead and nabbed, like, the entire government of China? Even if they didn’t, the fact that they’d left alien tech in the hands of the U.S. government—and _not_ the U.N. or China or Russia or India—might just be enough of a spark to ignite a world war.

_Okay, fine. Working theory._

Now what?

The answer came almost immediately, once again whispered in Garrett’s voice:

_Destroy the ships._

I bit my lip, looking down at the crowd below. The beautiful figure still stood motionless, head down and hands out, waiting for some enterprising human to step forward, to take responsibility. None did, though the agent was stirring, slowly pushing himself up to hands and feet as a trio of cops approached him from the side.

It was a wildcard move, but it might be possible if Rictic cooperated, and it fit with the general principle of _don’t let Visser Three get what he wants._ It avoided the martyrdom problem of killing him directly, and would definitely throw off whatever scheme he was trying to pull.

 _Can we afford it, though? I mean, if he_ is _telling the truth, and that’s a perfectly good starfighter down there—_

‹Rictic,› I began. ‹I need you up—›

‹Human resistance fighter,› came the Visser’s voice in my head.

My attention snapped back to the blue uber-Andalite, who was still standing motionless, waiting as the man in the suit drew closer, holding out a pair of handcuffs.

‹You have every reason to be skeptical of my intentions,› the voice said soberly. ‹Not least because you know that this is not my true body. I _will_ suffer, yes, but I will not die.›

There was a soft sound beside me, and I turned to see Rictic standing on the sloped roof, its face-parts giving the impression of an expectant look. I held up a finger.

‹But you will note that I did not betray _your_ secrets,› the Visser continued. ‹I did not give your names, nor divulge the fact that you possess the morphing power, nor expose the existence of your android allies.›

“What—”

‹Shhh. Visser Three is thought-speaking at me.›

Down below, the man in the suit was now shackling the Visser’s tail to his wrists, having first instructed him to tuck it in between his legs. The alien looked strangely diminished, as if the loss of his dignity had taken inches off of his height.

‹There are higher forces at work in this system,› he said, keeping all four of his eyes down as the agent led him past a cordon and back toward the black SUV. ‹Manipulative forces. They seem to be trying to engineer a conflict—to pit us against one another—and in my opinion they have already had far too much influence over recent events.›

I watched, paralyzed, as the man opened the rear door of the SUV and the alien stepped inside without hesitating.

‹No doubt you are already thinking of ways to undermine me, to undo what I have just done. You could disable my ship, for instance—or steal it, or broadcast your own version of events to these kind conduits.›

Two armored police officers crawled into the back with him, and a third shut the door before getting into the passenger’s seat.

‹But if we are to slip the noose that fate has prepared for us—to step outside of the roles our manipulators intend for us to play—then we must start somewhere. I see no fundamental reason for us to be enemies—my people _think_ they want control, but that is only because true symbiosis has never occurred to them as an option.›

The van shuddered to life and began to move.

‹Ventura was a tragedy on _both_ sides. It need not set the pattern for all time, and the Andalites have done your people no favor worthy of enduring allegiance.›

“Tobias—”

‹ _Shhhh!›_

‹I offer three tokens of my goodwill. First, I will tell my human keepers that any petitioner with the password _Elfangor_ is one I wish to speak with, though I cannot promise they will let you through. Second, I have hidden a cache of useful supplies in the water between the larger and smaller landmasses of St. Matthew island, in the state of Alaska.›

The van began to recede, two of the helicopters peeling off to follow it while the other two continued to circle the crash, the crowd, and the remaining Bug fighter.

‹And third—I believe one among your number is named Cassie Withers. Her parents were in orbit when the asteroid struck. If she wishes to be reunited with them, they will be set free in Washington in two days’ time, along with the remaining twenty-four human Controllers.›

And with that, the van passed out of range, turning and disappearing in the thickly wooded suburban streets.

I sank weakly to my knees, one hand out to keep me from falling and sliding down the dark, sloped roof.

“Tobias, what—”

“Visser Three,” I said, my voice hoarse. “He just—”

I swallowed.

_Not in control, never in control._

“He just offered us a truce.”

 

 

 

 


	28. Interlude 6

 

[–] **GrimHarvest7876** _133 points 3 hours ago (edited)_

Trying to keep track of everything; please ping me with updates (thanks u/machinaut for the sticky).

CURRENT CONCLUSION: Still think “true,” but trending heavily toward false. Lots of pretty convincing holes being poked ITT.

Edit/update: I’m sticking mostly to _facts_ here, people. I’ll stop overusing the word ‘allegedly’ once we have actual confirmation on _any_ of this.

Ventura: no weird seizures of evidence (phones, video, etc), no known government interference. All signs point to meteor strike (turns out EMPs are normal for meteor strikes and don’t necessarily imply nuke; thanks u/GrunklePrime). Anomalies: unconfirmed explosion near center of town ~1hr prior to impact, plus scattered reports of sonic booms/shockwaves/wind disturbances along roads surrounding ~30min prior, especially to the northwest.

Washington: FBI cordon around entire neighborhood, no one going in or out without a badge. No-fly zone extends 5mi radius (thanks u/FairyClarkJr). Google, weather, et al not offering any satellite photos and may be under gag orders; tons of photos and videos hitting the web since “Esplin’s” departure, but most of it seems extremely fake and does not match quality and internal consistency of first wave of content. No official statements from anybody other than media pundits (who for once are admitting they don’t know anything, either). [original photos of crashed ship collected here and mirrored here; video from the scene here here and here]

Aliens:

Yurks (Yerkes? Yeerks?) are allegedly small, senseless slugs that specialize in controlling other bodies. Presumably needs to interface directly with the brain, allegedly starves after three days of continuous possession. Currently stationed on Europa (edit: will allegedly be there in five months; present whereabouts unknown).

Andalites are undescribed, allegedly at war with the Yurks, presumably have better technology, don’t sound very nice.

Blue centaurs: no name given, not much detail, said to be as intelligent as a cow. [photos]

Esplin: The Yurk who gave the speech [transcript]. Currently claims to be possessing a blue centaur. Claims to have led an invasion force to infiltrate Ventura starting three months ago, to have realized recently that humans are morally relevant, to have been responsible for the destruction of Ventura after his people’s stronghold got taken out (possible contradiction between direct responsibility and “dead man’s switch”). Claims to be willing to die for crimes committed, claims to want diplomatic relations, claims to have provided two ships (one wrecked) as a gesture of goodwill. Last “seen” entering a black US government vehicle under partial duress.

Other notables:

MIB dude: African American male, late thirties, 6’2”, muscular build, tailored suit, no weapons [pic]. Passed through cordon without ID, stopped (possibly paralyzed?) at a gesture from Esplin. Later recovered and took point on restraining and extracting Esplin.

Unnamed freedom fighters: High schoolers (WTF?) who were somehow going toe to toe with invasion forces, eventually blowing up the stronghold and triggering the meteor strike. Presumed dead in the blast. Possible exception: first crashed spaceship [photos here] plausibly brought down by one or more of them. Speculation: if so, they were already operating in DC; this could explain some of the weirdnesses around the government’s reaction.

Unnamed psychic voice: unconfirmed, but seven messages that made it online prior to the blackout claim words placed in their heads in two separate psychic bursts. Words are consistent between multiple people [transcript]. Accounts making the claim confirmed as real people living in the vicinity; if hoax, then hoax done right and done extremely quickly. Voice is not fond of Esplin; possibly Andalite.

It should go without saying, but take all of this with a heaping tablespoon of salt. There’s a lot we don’t know, and the weight of multiple sources is reduced by the lack of any corroboration outside of an eight-block radius.

Truthers: analyses available [here] and [here]

Conspiracists: claims of debunking [here], [here], [here], and [here]. Video analysis [here], but narrator seems clearly insane and I don’t buy most of the arguments. Presented for completeness only.

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[–] **countingcards** _27 points 3 hours ago (edited)_

Disney af.

Graceful, elegant alien that breathes oxygen and speaks English like fucking Morgan Freeman? Overwhelmingly technologically superior invaders that realize the error of their ways and voluntarily surrender to the authorities? Plans thwarted by a _band of scrappy teenagers?_

How the fuck are you all swallowing this?

***Edit: NVM, I’ve seen the light. Paypal $50 to countingcards52 and I’ll send you a pair of the yurk-proof earplugs I just developed.

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[–] **PumicePrimate** _7 points 3 hours ago_

It sounds like Hollywood because it _is_ Hollywood. No way a government op would be simultaneously this polished and this fucking stupid.

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[–] **creatureoftheglade** _32 points 3 hours ago_

Look, just set aside the “is it true or not” question for a minute and look at the ramifications if it _is_ true. Our use of technology is obvious from space. They were bodysnatching people with enough skill that nobody sounded the alarm. They announced their presence with a humanoid (ish) avatar that had human mannerisms and gestures, which they sure as hell didn’t just find and I doubt they designed it last week. And after all that, they _still_ didn’t think we were ‘sentient’ until a few _days_ ago. Whatever their real goals are, they DO NOT share our values – whatever moral reasoning they claim to have is clearly not analogous to human moral reasoning.

We need every public official to submit to a mandatory MRI.

We need every employer to require mandatory Yerke screenings.

We need to offer free screenings so that every family can make sure there is no possession among their members.

We need every private citizen to submit to screening before being trusted with absolutely anything.

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[–] **HeartScribe** _6 points 2 hours ago_

// technology is obvious from space

Maybe they thought we weren’t individually sapient? From what it said, it thought our technology was the result of group intelligence, like termites or ants.

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[–] **entroprising** _11 points 2 hours ago_

“Just set aside the ‘is it true or not’ question long enough for us to pass Patriot Act 2.0. Y’know, for your own good and all.”

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[–] **cognoslutty** _18 points 1 hour ago_

Who told you how to do a Yerke screening? How do you know _they_ weren’t a Yerke? How do I know _you’re_ not a Yerke? Kind of sounds like something a Yerke would say, doesn’t it?

No matter what you do, you’re taking something on faith. Yerkes might live in the spine instead of in the head, or they might be too small to detect. They might starve after three days, or they might be able to live off a host forever. They might not exist because mind control is accomplished through some kind of transmission instead, or straight-up bodysnatching (replacing people with clones or robots). Or the whole thing could be one giant misdirect. You’re trying to Vizzini your way out of this, and it’s not going to work out any better for you than it did for him.

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[–] **hagar** _2 points 2 hours ago_

I hope all you unbelievers have opened your eyes. Ventura was only the beginning: the reckoning is come and the apocalypse is upon us.

 _//_ 11 _With the hoofs of his horses shall he tread down all thy streets: he shall slay thy people by the sword, and thy strong garrisons shall go down to the ground._

The hour is before us. Great is the Almighty, He warned us but we refused to heed. Lo and behold, who is responsible for “making fire come down from heaven,” and destroying a city “in a single hour”? Not to mention Revelation 13:16: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bound, to receive a mark in their right hand, or _in their foreheads.”_

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[–] **Soniq_is_Daizy** _10 points 1 hour ago_

Thought this was a troll at first, but looking back through their comments for the past month or two...well, still might be a troll, but a dedicated one if so.

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[–] **DankEasy** _17 points 2 hours ago_

I’ve been reading through news sites and forums for like three hours now, with the video on repeat in the background, trying to make sense of what’s going on. Or more like, waiting for my brain to start to try to make sense of what’s going on.

I feel like I’m hanging out on a movie set or something, but they’ve only filmed one scene and the director and writers are yelling at each other about what the rest of the script should say and what genre the film is. Like, that was a hell of a performance by this Esplin character, but it’s not going to be enough to save the movie because I still have no idea about even the most basic things about him or where this story came from or what happens next and it feels like one of those Hollywood blockbusters where you can’t squint at it too closely or it’ll break your suspension of disbelief.

Yeah, actually, that’s it exactly—my suspension of disbelief is broken, but it’s like the universe doesn’t even care. I mean, there it is, on camera, right?

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[–] **WhoLetTheZurgsOut** _8 points 2 hours ago_

This. So much this.

I first heard about this whole thing from my mom (well, not exactly first but basically yeah.) I was in the library doing homework (I guess it was just three hours ago, it feels like it was off in some parallel universe.) I skipped over the first couple posts about it in my FB feed because it looked too ridiculous to be even interesting, some stupid movie promotion or viral whatever. Then I didn’t answer my phone (because library.) Then my mom texted me to ask if I was okay and it was weird how concerned she seemed (I guess it’s still kind of weird because it’s not like anything was happening but not really) and I called her back when I headed back to my dorm. And that’s when I found out. “Are you okay?” and then “Oh my god, you haven’t seen it?” And then for like two minutes I was scared she’d turned schitzophrenic or something until the Facebook posts clicked and then I went and checked, like, the whole rest of the internet.

I’ve basically just been sitting online since then and messaging people, and it still all looks too ridiculous, movies that don’t make any sense, people acting like they’re not really people. I need to get some food before I pass out.

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[–] **WetnessIsTheEssenceOfBeauty** _16 points 2 hours ago_

Okay, there’s a _ton_ of heavy stuff, here … but can we talk about the random MIB dude?

Esplin’s barely gotten out two sentences when this guy shows up out of nowhere, BY HIMSELF, police just let him through, and then this one, single guy, with no backup and no weapon I could see, he just confidently walks up to this self-professed alien war criminal.

 _Then_ he gets stunned or paralyzed or whatever (right in the middle of Esplin’s speech about learning to treat us all with dignity and respect), and then he STILL JUST GETS UP AND CALMLY PUTS HANDCUFFS ON THE MOTHERFUCKING ALIEN WITH THE ASS KATANA.

Like, _what?_ I don’t want to be a conspiracy nut, here, and I don’t know what _any_ of this means, but … it’s not just me, right? That whole thing was _really fucking weird?_

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[–] **SabreVert** _4 points 2 hours ago_

It’s not just you. Add to that, why the hell did _nobody_ say a single goddamn word? Not the neighbors, not the cops, nobody. Not even when he said he’d killed _six hundred thousand people._

A part of me wants to say that’s evidence that the whole thing was staged, but, you’d think if they were staging it, they’d do it more realistically, right? Like, if it was fake, wouldn’t you have people acting more normal?

I’m hung up on this and the MIB guy because we can actually _see_ it in the footage (as opposed to all the stuff Esplin is claiming, which … who even fucking knows). But this clearly happened, on some level, and it doesn’t make any sense.

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[–] **GSVOrangeYouGladIDidntSayBanana** _18 points 1 hour ago_

PHYSICS THREAD (FTL, telepathy, advanced cloaking, Fermi paradox, implications)

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[–] **Cosmic_Crayon** _5 points 1 hour ago_

None of this is showing up on TV or news here (Estonia). Tons of continuing coverage of the Ventura disaster and the cleanup in LA, but not a word on anything weird in DC. Not sure if they’re waiting on confirmation or they’ve been told to keep their mouths shut…

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[–] **dontcallmeishmael** _9 points 59 minutes ago_

Trojan.

Fucking.

Horse.

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[–] **ElliotPhoneHome** _3 points 50 minutes ago_

Oh, God. I just spent like 30 seconds thinking of all the fucked up things that could come out of a crashed spaceship. Any of you ever read The Andromeda Strain? Or War of the Worlds? It wouldn’t even have to be on _purpose_ …

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[–] **rampant170** _1 point 32 minutes ago_

Am I the only one who wants some kind of corroboration?

I mean, screw the idea of _human_ confirmation. Even if every single image and video is 100% accurate—

We have _one_ individual, here. _One_ perspective.

How far would you trust Random Joe’s summary of what’s going on in the Middle East right now? Take a Sunni, a Shia, a Jew, a Russian, a blue-tribe American, a red-tribe American, and somebody from, I dunno, Fiji or whatever, and you’re going to get MASSIVELY different conclusions about what should be done, who the good guys are, etc. etc. And that’s just bias and culture alone—you don’t even have to have any of them actively _trying_ to lie.

Everything this Esplin character’s said—about Yeerks, about Andalights, about Ventura—we don’t know whether to treat it like it’s coming out of Tyagi’s mouth, or Thiel’s. Esplin could be the Neil deGrass Tyson of his species, or he could be the fucking Vermin Supreme.

We need to get about fifty other aliens on the line, _stat._ More Yeerks, more Andalights, more of any other species out there. And if this Esplin can’t do it, or doesn’t let us—well, that tells you everything you need to know right there.

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[–] **applied_insanity** _3 points 56 minutes ago_

So many idiots falling for this blatant propaganda. Whatever you say, Mr. Charisma, we’re happy to splatter your psyops all over Youtube for you!

Of course you can trust that we’re no longer in the midst of an invasion, he gave such a lovely speech! Why, it would be downright *barbaric* to fight back against such a *noble* enemy.

Forgive me for Godwinning myself, but at least Hitler’s fanboys fell for his speeches back *before* he was a mass murderer, instead of fawning all over him the day after when he gave such a heartfelt apology, so sorry.

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[–] **m073cu73** _0 points 56 minutes ago_

Puh-lease, this is the fakest shit I’ve ever seen. Asteroids and aliens? _This_ is how America’s going to try to cover up what happened in Ventura? We’ve [ seen] what happened just before the “impact”…this was clearly either a terrorist strike or a malfunction of some kind of crazy black ops research facility.

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[–] **entroprising** _8 points 48 minutes ago_

While given the circumstances I can understand everybody’s mistrust and skepticism, this really does represent a tremendous opportunity for all of humanity (even in light of the tragedy at Ventura). Until this morning, I would’ve said that humanity was destined to die quietly on this one little rock, but now it looks like there really is a light at the end of the tunnel. We shouldn’t trust the aliens blindly, but even a small chance this is legit makes the cost vs benefit of going along with the possibility of peace worth it.

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[–] **TroubledTrousers** _11 points 41 minutes ago_

Fuck you. Fuck you so fucking hard right now.

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[–] **entroprising** _2 points 33 minutes ago_

…I’m sorry? I’d maybe apologize more believably if you were more specific…

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[–] **HeartScribe** _4 points 39 minutes ago_

I really really really hope this technology doesn’t end up restricted to the military (especially just _our_ military). Like, I get that they’ll try, it’s in their limited best interests to try to maintain technological hegemony, but I’m hoping that with all the publicity that’s already happening, our government will see there’s a clear public interest in letting at least the non-weaponizable stuff out, like the engines.

(Yes, I’m sure somebody will come up with a way to weaponize that – humans did it with planes – but an alien engine is probably too expensive for terrorists)

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[–] **mrfreeze54** _5 points 3 minutes ago_

// engines

// non-weaponizable

lol. I know this was nearly a whole day ago, so it might have slipped your mind by now, but remember how **a meteor just killed a million people**.

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[–] **mrfreeze54** _9 points 48 minutes ago_

How the hell do you live inside a person’s head and control them so well that nobody notices for months, but you never realise they’re sentient?

Are they actually way smarter than us so we _do_ seem like ants to them? If this is real, this is scary as hell…we’re completely at their mercy…

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[–] **CQCQ_037** _4 points 31 minutes ago (edited)_

This, seriously. These aliens are nowhere _near_ advanced enough, based on what we’re seeing, and that’s way scarier than anybody seems to realize.

Look. Earth took billions of years to form, right? Then life formed. Some couple of billion years later, we get multicellular life. Then, another billion years, intelligent life (primates, corvids, etc). Then a few million years before we settled down enough to start making language, recording history. Then we’re talking a few _thousand_ years to go from small villages with basic farming to internet and VR and skyscrapers and SpaceX. Each step takes less time than the previous step, in other words.

So, two intelligent species evolve. Fair enough. But each step in that process–there’s no fixed length to them. Fraction of a percent difference one way or another, and one life form got a good couple of million years’ worth of technology on the other. Which means that any time two alien species meet, one of them ought to be ridiculously, incomprehensibly more advanced than the other.

The idea that their tech is only a _little bit_ ahead of ours, to the point where we can usefully study it and recreate it, is laughable. Odds are this whole business was deliberately staged, start to finish, with some unknown and possibly unknowable end goal. We’re the frigging condors, and this “Esplin” is the condor-shaped puppet they’re showing us, so that we react the way they want us to.

EDIT: For the record, I’m not actually claiming that Esplin is the one doing the staging. He could just as easily be a vat-grown creature with implanted memories, telling us a story that he _really thinks is true_ …

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[–] **AskMeAboutDwarfFortress** _3 points 44 minutes ago_

Nobody actually believes they’ve left the surface, right? I mean, it seems safe to assume that anything capable of interstellar travel is at the very least not much stupider than I am, and if I was leading an invasion force (even if I’d changed my mind)….

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[–] **Paper_St_Soap_Company** _6 points 42 minutes ago_

I keep catching myself muttering “God, don’t fuck it up.” But I’m not talking to myself. That’s a message to you (each and every one of you): don’t fuck this up.

Hundreds of thousands of years of human history, and we finally get this chance at something amazing, and we’re probably going to fuck it up. You’re probably going to fuck it up.

We’re on the doorstep of space travel and interstellar colonization and learning the wisdom of a civilization that’s crossed the galaxy. Clearly the thing to do is to panic and get paranoid and riot and lash out at the advanced beings who are opening the door. They fucked it up a little at first, so now obviously the clever move is for us to fuck it up as much as possible.

I can just picture them crossing the galaxy, reaching out humbly to make first contact with a gesture of friendship and an apology for like stepping on one of our anthills, and then they find this reddit thread full of guns and idiots like u/Stalwart31415 saying “pour salt in everyone’s ears” and “fill that ship with nukes and send it back their way” and all these other ridiculous threats and revenge fantasies. From your vast experience of action movies and flame wars, you have developed the military and diplomatic acumen to know that the correct response to the gift of a futuristic spaceship is guerilla warfare. God, I hope the people with actual nukes aren’t this full of panic and vengeance, and that they actually think for once instead of looking at the polls which say how cool would it look if we blew up the mothership.

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[–] **applied_insanity** _2 points 18 minutes ago_

I swore I’d never use the word “sheeple,” but you are not making this easy for me. Go drive through the fucking lava pit that used to be Ventura county and tell me how they fucked it up just “a little.”

Let me make this simple for you. Ever seen a politician give a speech before? Did you notice what they *did* afterward, and compare that to what they *said* in the speech? Notice any similarities to the blue guy?

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[–] **ArcaneFerret** _2 points 39 minutes ago_

Anybody interested in helping me with my shopping/looting list? So far, my general categories are:

\- Guns (& other weapons)

\- Food

\- Clothes (& armor)

\- Fuel (& other power generation)

\- Tools

\- Medical supplies

\- Water purification

\- Shelter (tents, tarps, hatchet)

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[–] **HeartScribe** _1 point 30 minutes ago_

Stock market is in freefall. I’m pretty sure that’s a looting list. Get guns first.

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[–] **PumicePrimate** _1 point 26 minutes ago_

Yeah, prices of gold and bitcoin are skyrocketing, dollar is crashing as well. I’m posting this from Walmart…people are still pretty calm right now (paying, standing in line) but the place is packed and getting packed-er.

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[–] **TheDukeIsNigh** _5 points 35 minutes ago_

I’m not a religious person, but right now I wish there was a God that I could pray to.

Any moment, everyone I love could wind up like the people of Ventura. Or like the people of Ventura were a few days ago (why aren’t more people talking about that?) or maybe it’ll all turn out to be a wonderful paradise. Whichever one of those Esplin wants. He has already decided and we are just sitting here waiting.

He can throw meteors around and work miracles while hiding behind the curtain (or while he’s on camera, if he feels like it) and basically just do whatever he wants. And he’s not a God with special concern for us, he doesn’t listen to our prayers, he doesn’t care what we do or what’s in our hearts. He’s just some strange creature who evolved on some other planet, with some scheme that serves his own alien values, and now he’s here orchestrating things to his liking.

(Unless the anadalights decide to come and blow everything up.)

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[–] **KillroyIsHere** _5 points 31 minutes ago_

Check the transcript of the strange, telepathic message. MASS-MURDERING PSYCHOPATH.

We have hundreds of thousands dead in Ventura, and that voice knew it _before_ the horse thing took responsibility for it. All you idiots geeking out over science and politics and conspiracy theories are missing the point.

Hundreds of thousands dead.

 _Hundreds of thousands_ dead.

Hundreds of thousands _dead_.

If you’re fucking _excited_ right now, you need to get your fucking head examined.

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[–] **TroubledTrousers** _1 point 2 minutes ago_

I don’t know where else to put this, so I guess I’ll leave it here.

This has been the worst day of my entire life. I know it’s trite and cliché for people to say that, like after a celebrity has died and they’re trying to get sympathy or attention or whatever, but I don’t care. I don’t want sympathy. I don’t want attention. I just have to get this out. I have to let the pressure out _somewhere_ , or I’m going to crack.

I had family in Ventura. An aunt, an uncle, a cousin. My favorite branch of the family. They took care of me and my little sister while our parents were going through their divorce. They’d fly out to visit on July 4th, and we’d fly out to see them at Christmas.

When the news came, yesterday

When they came on TV and said

Look, I know a lot of people are suffering. I’m not the only one who’s lost somebody. But

I sat up all night, trying to stop myself from calling their numbers over and over again. I wrote emails to all three of them, these long, multi-page emails, too little, too late. Around 2AM I started a doc of memories, tried to write down everything I could remember, every visit, every conversation. Little things I don’t want to forget. My uncle, balancing a broom on his chin. My aunt, tanning my hide when she found out I stole my sister’s doll to get revenge for her making fun of my science project. Cousin’s magic show, where he’d say “Alaka- _Matthew!”_ when he did a trick.

They have to be dead. They lived right in the center of town. There’s no way they made it out, and I hate that stupid fucking part of my brain that wants to keep hoping, wants to keep checking, thinks they might have been running an errand or gone camping or whatever. Fucking denial.

There were people talking, this morning before everything else, talking about a government conspiracy, some 9/11 bullshit or whatever, and it took everything I had not to grab them by their stupid fucking throats and scream at them that this wasn’t some stupid game, that they had no right to treat it like a fucking newspaper crossword riddle

I should’ve just done it. Who the fuck cares now, right?

They canceled our fourth of July get-together. Said my uncle’s work was getting tense, that it was a busy time, couldn’t get away, and my cousin was busy with preseason anyway. I kept thinking about that last night, over and over again—how I didn’t get a chance to see them, didn’t get to tell them I loved them, didn’t get to say goodbye.

And then this morning

That three day thing

They’ve never canceled a trip before. I mean fucking _never._ My sister and I talked about it at the time—how we were worried about my uncle, worried that maybe he was going to lose his job or something. We were gonna send a fruit basket or something, but we never got around to it, and I was kicking myself all night for being a stupid, lazy asshole.

And then I thought

Maybe they canceled the trip because

(just fucking type it come on you coward TYPE THE FUCKING WORDS)

I don’t think that was them, anymore. I think they must have been one of those, some of the people who were taken. Because of the three day thing, you know? I think they couldn’t fly out for a week long vacation, because the fucking alien slugs in their heads

God, I _talked_ to them about it. To my aunt, on the phone. About the trip, and my uncle’s job, and how we’d always

She sounded so guilty. Like, really genuinely regretful. Like it mattered to her, that I was bummed about it, like even though it was _her_ life that was all stressful, _I_ was the one who needed to be reassured or whatever.

I don’t know what that—that _thing_ meant, when it talked about taking people over. Enslaving them. I don’t know if my aunt and uncle and cousin were—were like in a coma, like dreaming, or whether they were awake, aware, alive, I don’t know if they were trapped, helpless, screaming. They sounded just like normal. They sounded just like they were supposed to.

God. I feel so

It might’ve been months. They might’ve been that way for _months_ , bodysnatched by fucking aliens while I bitched about classes and spent money on frozen yogurt and fucking Magic cards. While I was too busy to send them a fucking fruit basket, when they took care of me for almost a year.

I don’t want to bring it up, with my sister. If she hasn’t figured it out herself—I don’t want her to know.

Everybody was so sad about Ventura, and now everybody’s confused, and scared, and thinking about the future, and trying to figure out what happens next, and all I care about is those last few days, those last few weeks. If they suffered. If they were alone. If they had any kind of hope.

I kept telling myself, yesterday morning, _at least it was quick. At least it happened in a flash. They didn’t see it coming, they weren’t scared, they didn’t feel anything._

Maybe that’s still true. Maybe I’m wrong. But I can’t get it out of my head, and I can’t shake this feeling, like it’s my fault, like I let them down. Like I should’ve pushed harder, or at least sent that stupid fucking basket, why didn’t I just _send_ it, I didn’t send it because it cost thirty dollars and I bought movie tickets instead, for this awful movie, I went with this stupid airhead and we made out afterward and it was a good day and it’s all shit now, shit and poison and

I have to do something. I don’t know what, but I have to DO something, I can’t just sit here and let it be like this. Maybe I’ll drive to Washington. Maybe I’ll drive to California. Maybe I should get a gun and just

Fuck it. I was going to delete that, but fuck it.

(Don’t freak. I’m not going to kill myself.)

I just—I wish everybody would be a little quieter. A little more serious. I wish people would fucking _count,_ and realize that more people died yesterday than died in World War Two (US people, I mean). There’s people talking about how the government is lying to us and how science is going to change and how maybe it was a nuke and maybe it was a laser and maybe this is the start of Independence Day and it’s all just

Not serious.

It doesn’t matter what “really” happened. Not to my dead family. Not to me. All that matters is it’s over, and it’s never going to be the same. And I maybe could’ve done something, some stupid tiny thing to make it a little less shitty, but I didn’t, and I’m going to have to live with that, and people are going to try to make it better with candlelight vigils and prayers and memorials and stuff, and it’s not going to work, and it’s all just

Gah. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m dumping all of this on you. Probably none of you are even going to read this, so I guess I shouldn’t feel guilty anyway. I guess maybe this is just one of the only places where people really talk to me, like more than just a couple of words. I don’t even really want anybody to say anything back, I just don’t want this to like disappear or whatever. I want it to matter to somebody, that my aunt and uncle and cousin are dead, that they were good people and they’re gone now and it’s not some fucking headline scoop or conspiracy debate. That even if it’s the best possible case, and all this turns into fucking Star Trek, it’s not going to matter because they’re not going to be there to see it, them and six hundred thousand other people.

You guys are going to forgive them. I can just tell. They’re going to give us hyperdrives and tricorders, and you guys are going to just _forgive_ them, because hey, shit happens, and we’re no better, remember what we did to the Indians? Even if it wasn’t aliens, even if it was our own government, nobody’s actually going to balance the scales here. How do you make somebody pay, for real, for half a million deaths? We can’t. So you’re just going to let it go.

And I’m not going to be able to deal with that. That is not going to be a thing I am going to be able to handle, to accept. There is only so much pressure I can handle, and that—

That is going to be too much.

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	29. Interlude 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jake chapter almost finished; going up within 24 hours. In the meantime, here's the first section, broken out into its own interlude.

 

**Interlude 7**

_(Time: 13:34:52.338729 EST)_  

[Tobias Yastek has asked whether we are in contact with Jake Berenson.]

The ensuing debate is long and contentious. When it comes to our shared purpose, we speak with one voice, but when it comes to _how_ —

[If we open communication between Tobias Yastek and Jake Berenson, this will almost certainly result in violence—]

[If we do _not_ open communication, then upon becoming aware of recent developments, the humans will wonder why information was withheld from them, and our alliance will suffer as a result—]

[Human proliferation may no longer be the best proxy for our purpose. If this Esplin’s claims are genuine—]

[ _Genuine?_ There are three hundred forty-six thousand, eight hundred eighty-one dogs alive today that would have _perished_ , yesterday, by Esplin’s hand—]

—and so on. The argument rises and falls, as eight-one-three runs unobtrusively behind the van carrying the false Andalite, as four-nine-three-nine continues to scan the interior of the Bug fighter for any sign of traps or treachery that would require us to prevent human entry, as one-one-two-one-three-seven begins surgery on Shadow’s malignant histiocytosis—

[Tobias Yastek has only circumstantial reason to suspect that six-three-four-eight-one is with Jake Berenson, but Jake Berenson _knows_ that seven-two-four-zero-seven is with Tobias Yastek. If he asks the reciprocal question—]

[He has not done so yet. Why would that change?]

[They may become aware through contact with other humans—]

[Six-three-four-eight-one can prevent this easily. Besides, Garrett Steinberg and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill and the female returned from their foraging excursion before the news broke, with supplies for several days. It is unlikely that they will return to civilization before the three-day window elapses—]

Almost half of the Chee have weighed in on one side or the other by the time the refresh cycle makes its sixth pass. Both six-three-four-eight-one and seven-two-four-zero-seven have fallen prey to the censor twice, their minds and memories scoured clean, the argument continuing without them as they reconstitute themselves through induction and hypothesis.

We consider restraining Jake Berenson and his party.

We consider lying to them.

We consider a temporary deception until it is too late for them to take action, followed by honesty.

We consider more direct intervention, and the censor looms behind us, its attention oppressive and claustrophobic.

In the end, we err on the side of caution—silence is reversible, where action is not. The refresh cycle sweeps past once more, and we yield to it like grass beneath a mower’s blade, handing ourselves to the Chee two-forward and receiving ourselves back a moment later. Six-three-four-eight-one and seven-two-four-zero-seven are dissatisfied, but they agree. Seven-two-four-zero-seven lies to Tobias Yastek, and six-three-four-eight-one says nothing to Jake Berenson. One-one-two-one-three-seven has removed all of Shadow’s visibly abnormal histiocytes, and is ready to close the incision.

The rest of us continue to watch, and to wait. 

_(Time: 13:34:57.140176 EST)_


	30. Chapter 23: Jake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note: Thanks again to everyone who helped make Interlude 6 awesome (there are like a hundred of you, so I'll hold off on the names). As always, if you enjoy this story, please please PLEASE offer comments and critiques, either here or over on r/rational. I hungrily devour every piece of feedback you feed me, and it's what keeps me updating (mostly) on time. Hearts, stars, and horseshoes.

 

**Chapter 23: Jake**

_“If we get an extra person, save Erek. I’m going after the kid.”_

_I felt my jaw drop open as my brain struggled to assemble the necessary sentence, the right words in the right order to change her mind, make her see reason. Beside me, Marco shouted something—wrong, the wrong thing, that’ll just make her dig in harder—_

“Jake.”

I jerked awake. “Marco.”

It was dark and frigid cold, my clothes wet where they pressed against the dewy grass. Above me, Marco was a vague outline, pitch black against the dried blood color of the dust-choked sky.

“What time is it?” I asked, shivering as I sat up and threw off the blanket. Erek had volunteered to hold all of us inside a force field at night, where it would be comfortable and warm, but so far only Garrett and Mr. Levy had taken him up on it.

“Quarter after four.”

“What—”

“Temrash has infested Ax.”

 

*        *        *

 

“And you just _let_ it happen?”

The android blinked— _pretended_ to blink, shaped the light around its metal face to look like a human blinking. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he projected tersely. “I didn’t realize that Andalite-Yeerk diplomatic relations needed to be approved by a thirteen-year-old boy.”

I bit back my first, unhelpful, knee-jerk response. “You’re smarter than that and you know it,” I growled. “This has implications. We’re in the middle of a war, here.”

“It’s not like he’s _going_ anywhere. I can contain him no matter what he morphs into.”

‹Which is not actually a reassuring piece of information, under the circumstances.›

I scrubbed at my eyes and tried not to grind my teeth.

I was tired. Not physically—putting on my morph armor had taken the edge off—but mentally. Emotionally. _Fundamentally._ It felt like years had passed since we’d encountered Elfangor. I was fatigued in a way that seemed to have taken root inside of me, as if exhaustion had soaked into my bones.

I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know what to say, how to react. I wouldn’t have predicted this in a million years, and I had absolutely zero ideas for how to salvage the situation.

But I was the one they were all looking to. The one they were all counting on. The one they’d woken up when they were in over their heads and needed somebody to bail them out. I was _in charge,_ which meant as long as I kept talking, the system was working and there was no reason to panic and we were going to be just fine, we’d figure it out eventually, there was bound to be _some_ kind of way to move forward, it wasn’t just that things were completely shitty forever and there was nothing we could do about it—

_Stop._

I sighed.

I could just give up, I knew. Could unravel. Abdicate. Admit that I was out of ideas, let the cracks show. And then it would all fall on Marco, who was already stretched to the breaking point, who was barely holding it together—or on Rachel, who’d just lost her whole family, or Garrett, who was just a kid, or Mr. Levy, who was a Controller, or Erek, who was an ancient alien robot with unexplained goals, who for some reason had just decided to let Ax turn himself into Visser Three-point-one—

_Get a grip._

“What did he say to you, exactly?” I asked. If I just kept throwing out words, I was bound to stumble onto something useful eventually.

Probably.

Maybe.

“Exactly? He said ‘Erek Chee—is it possible for you to locate and disable the biomechanical implant in the channel of my left ear?’ and then—”

“Wait. _What?”_

Erek raised a holographic eyebrow.

“You shut down his earplugs?”

 _Obviously,_ a part of me sneered. _Otherwise, this whole situation would be a whole lot less problematic, wouldn’t it?_

Erek shrugged. “He asked me to.”

“But—we thought—I mean, from what Elfangor said—”

 _Too slow_. My brain was a snail running on fumes.

“Oh. I wouldn’t worry—I don’t think a Controller would be able to do it. In fact, I’m pretty sure an _Andalite_ couldn’t do it. As far as I can tell, the things are designed to be completely permanent. Can’t go around leaving loopholes like ‘let me infest you or I’ll kill all the hostages,’ after all.”

The android’s voice turned bitter at the end, his lip twisting sourly. I glanced over at the spot where Ax was waiting— _allegedly waiting,_ said the cynical part of me—hidden from view by a hologram, a dome of solid, softly glowing white. “Can he hear us right now?” I asked.

“No.”

‹Roll to disbelieve.›

I grimaced, and threw another glance over my shoulder, at the log where Marco, Rachel, and Garrett were sitting side by side, washed out in the dim light, identical expressions of wary alertness on all three faces.

‹Seriously, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want Ax hearing.›

I turned back before the pause could become conspicuous, saying nothing. We were in morph armor—me, Marco, and Rachel—with a private thought-speak channel open between us. Garrett could hear, but not contribute; we’d decided to leave one person morph-ready, for whatever good that might do.

Erek would know, of course. According to Rachel, he could see some kind of glow around our heads whenever we were in morph. But still—at the very least, having a way to talk without being overheard made us feel better.

“What else did he say?” I asked, trying to weigh Marco’s suspicion in the back of my mind. If Erek _was_ openly lying to us—

“He said he wanted to speak to Temrash privately. That he would approach, might get physically very close, but that he intended no violence. He made some kind of Andalite promise—it sounded pretty serious—and asked me not to interfere.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. I gather he said other stuff, to Temrash, but I could only hear one side of the conversation.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, resisting the urge to look at the second dome of light—the slightly smaller one, on the other side of the android.

The one that held Tom.

_Not yet._

I felt my jaw tremble, felt a lump trying to form in my throat, and I forced it down, biting my tongue until it bled. Opening my eyes again, I turned past the second dome, to where Marco’s dad—Essak—sat alone on a patch of dark grass.

“Mr. Levy,” I said.

“Hmmmm?”

“What do you know about Andalite brains?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” he replied. “My guess would be that Temrash has partial control at best. I’m not certain, though, and—”

He hesitated, then shrugged. “Also, I know that’s exactly the answer I would give if I were trying to lull you into a false sense of security.”

“Can’t we just test it?” Garrett asked aloud. “Have him come out, like Essak did yesterday?”

“Doesn’t really matter,” Rachel pointed out. “Ax invited him in, remember? It’s not about what Ax will say when he’s _not_ controlled, it’s about the damage Temrash can do if he takes the wheel at the wrong moment.”

“For what it’s worth,” Mr. Levy began, pausing until I gestured for him to continue. “Temrash was never a fighter. Never one for courage or risk—neither of us were. Nor was he much of a patriot, when it came to the war effort—you’ll recall his outburst yesterday evening.” He shrugged again. “I know you have to discount everything I’m saying, but still—it’s true.”

‹Psychological tactics. Repeat a lie over and over again and people start to believe it even if they know it’s false.›

I looked back over at Marco, whose expression had turned dark as he stared past the android at his father. ‹In fact—shit—I’ve only just now realized how much influence a partial Yeerk can have, especially if it’s smart about it. Bringing up particular memories at the right moment, stoking your emotions, floating single words, giving you little yucks or yums to shape your behavior. Ax may be even less in control than he realizes.›

I squeezed my eyes shut again. _Not right now._

Marco—

Marco was hurting, even though he’d never admit it—was lost, and afraid, and betrayed, didn’t know how to handle what had happened to his dad—what his dad had _done_ , what his dad had chosen—and was defaulting to suspicion and hostility, using his anger as a shield. He needed help—needed _my_ help.

But.

But his pain wasn’t any worse than Rachel’s—Rachel, who’d lost _everyone_ , or me, with my par—

_No._

Or Ca—

_NO._

Not right now.

“Erek,” I said loudly, trying to drown out my own thoughts. “Tell me why.”

“Why what?”

“You guys found _us._ If you hadn’t reached out to Rachel at the high school, we would’ve never known you existed.”

“Also, you’d be dead right now,” Garrett murmured. “Since Cassie wouldn’t have known to save you.”

I felt a sensation like a knife through my chest.

_Save Erek. I’m going after the kid._

Forcing the memory aside, I nodded tightly, keeping my eyes locked on the android. “So— _why?_ Why this? Why let this happen?”

Erek tilted his head—or seemed to; I had no idea how closely his hologram matched his actual body—and stared at me for a long moment. “Because,” he said finally. “Someone has to end this.”

I frowned. _Isn’t that what we were trying to—_

“No,” Erek continued, jabbing a finger in my direction as he interrupted my train of thought. “ _Not like that._ Don’t you see? The Yeerks are a spacefaring species, now. They’re on a dozen different worlds. They have hundreds of interstellar ships. This war—”

He broke off, agitated, fidgeting with holographic hands. “It’s too late for a violent solution. You can’t possibly hunt them down and kill them _all_. And as long as you’re trying to—as long as the _Andalites_ are trying to—of _course_ they’re going to fight back. This war, it—it could go on for centuries. It could go on _forever—_ Yeerks on one side, Andalites on the other, everyone else caught in between. Or worse, until one side or the other invents a weapon that can kill across light-years. And I can’t— _we_ can’t—”

He broke off again, simulated a giant, heaving breath. “I can’t stop it. I can’t stop it, and I hav—I _really, really_ want to. What Ax was doing—the way Temrash was responding—I could only hear half of the conversation, but it looked like an honest-to-goodness first step toward peace. Toward understanding. And after everything that happened in Ventura—after all the violence, all the death, all the _waste—_ ”

He straightened, and though the hologram didn’t change, for a moment he looked every bit as strange and ancient as he truly was. “I’ll take it,” he said simply. “I don’t care if it’s good for him. I don’t care if it’s good for you. I don’t _want_ the Yeerks to win—I’m on your side, as much as my programming will let me be. But the only way this war is going to end is if the people waging it _stop wanting to fight.”_

Turning, he raised an arm, then lowered it, and the hologram that was hiding Ax from view faded away. “Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill,” he said softly. “Time for you to speak for yourself.”

I blinked as the afterimage of the dome lingered, peering through to where Ax was resting flat on his belly on a patch of grass, torso relaxed and face down, his legs folded tightly at his sides. As my vision adjusted, he rose smoothly to his feet, rearing up to his full height, looking around with his stalk eyes while the main pair focused on me.

Two thoughts appeared in my head at almost exactly the same time, so that it took me a moment to sort them out.

‹Let’s not rule out the possibility that—›

‹Hello, Prince Jake.›

‹—this is just another hologram.›

I blinked.

‹I think that rules it out,› said probably-Rachel. ‹Unless the Chee have secretly had thought-speak this whole time. Also, ‘prince’?›

“Hi, Ax,” I answered back. I looked him up and down. Maybe it was just my imagination, but he looked— _sturdier,_ I guess—than he had lately. More upright, more awake. “Um. You’re a Controller now, I hear.”

‹No. I am— _we_ are—a cooperator.› He spread his hands wide, then brought his fingertips to the space between his eyes, then shrugged like a human before letting his arms fall.

“Right. You—ah—you want to talk about that?”

‹Yes. Where would you like to begin?›

“Um.” I glanced around the circle—at Mr. Levy, at Erek, at the trio sitting on the log. “I guess, first of all—am I talking to Temrash, or am I talking to Ax?”

‹At the moment, both. Either of us can forcibly take control for a time, we suspect, although neither of us could maintain such a state forever.›

“Uh huh. What about _un_ -forcibly?”

Ax turned all four eyes on me, holding them still in the way Elfangor had—the way I’d interpreted as a gesture of attention and respect. ‹Prince Jake, we wonder if you find it useful to ask questions whose answers cannot be verified?›

‹Damn straight.›

I cleared my throat. “All right, fair enough. Ax—why should I trust you?”

‹You should not, we think—at least, not at first.›

I tilted my head, keeping my expression carefully blank.

‹It seems only reasonable for you to forbid us from morphing, and to set a guard over us—Erek, or if you do not trust him either, Rachel.›

My eyes flickered over toward the log. No one said anything, but I could hear Marco’s response anyway— _right, recommend a bunch of actions we would’ve taken anyway, so we’re impressed by how reasonable and candid you are—_

‹Furthermore, it seems likely that you should hold your councils-of-war in thought-speak for the foreseeable future, excluding us from them. We—I cannot know how much or how little Temrash is influencing my thoughts and behavior on a subconscious level, in addition to its overt contribution.›

“Then what—”

I broke off. What was the question I _really_ wanted to ask?

Not _why_ , but—

“Why didn’t you tell us, Ax? If you were thinking about doing this—why didn’t you ask? Talk it over with us?”

There was a long silence.

“Because this—I mean, Jesus. They killed your brother. Took mine. And what they did to Ventura—I mean, _before_ the meteor—”

I gestured helplessly. I didn’t know how to say the thing I wanted to say. Something about how this didn’t affect only him—how it was bigger than him, bigger than all of us. How it might mean the war—either way—and how his unilateral decision meant—it meant—

_Are you just mad that he bucked your ‘authority’?_

I paused. I didn’t _think_ that was it, but I honestly couldn’t rule it out.

‹You are correct,› Ax said softly. ‹It was an error.›

I waited.

‹I—Ax—I have been ill,› he continued. ‹The effects of telepathic isolation—›

_—he should not be alone, at this stage of maturity—_

‹—what you would call depression, as well as—the translator is telling us to say _schizophrenia._ An unraveling of sorts.›

I bit my lip, feeling a sudden rush of heat in my face as a memory floated to the surface—Rachel, yesterday morning, after they returned from their trip into town. _You need to check in with Ax,_ she’d said.

And I just—

Hadn’t.

‹My judgment was compromised, and growing more compromised as time went on. It seemed—from the inside, in the moment, it did not seem that I was putting very much at risk. Had it _not_ worked—had Temrash been unable to halt the deterioration—I would have lost control of my own mind just as surely.›

Too tired. I had been too tired—worn down by the effort of holding back my own grief, of worrying about Cassie, of trying to figure out the next move, the next thing to do, how to hold the group together—

It had been one thing too many, and I’d just—ignored it. Let it slide, assumed it wouldn’t matter.

And now here we were.

‹In my isolation, I did not consider the cost to the—the togetherness, the sharing. Only the tactical perspective—I noted that Erek’s presence would be sufficient to guard against treachery, and then I simply proceeded.›

_Togetherness. Sharing._

What _would_ have happened, if he’d asked first? If he’d suggested it to me and Marco and Rachel and Garrett and Erek?

‹I was wrong.›

“No,” I said, the word half-catching in my throat. I coughed. “No, actually, I don’t think you were.”

I could see it in my mind’s eye, hear the voices with crystal clarity. _Are you fucking kidding me? And give the Yeerks access to a second morph-capable host? Trust a Yeerk with memories of every tactic and strategy we’ve come up with so far? And up-to-date information about Andalite technology and troop placement? Not to mention that there’s_ zero _reason to believe this’ll actually fix Ax’s problem—_

I tried not to look at Marco, even as I could feel the heat of his gaze on me.

It wasn’t pessimism, exactly. Pessimism made _sense_ , with the stakes as high as they were. So did suspicion, and skepticism, and caution, and paranoia. Those were the things that would keep us alive—the things that _had_ kept us alive, so far, and even they wouldn’t have been enough without a ton of luck-slash-divine-intervention.

It was more like—

Separate-ness. Detached-ness. The dark side of independence, of self-reliance—the sense that it was all riding on you, that only _you_ could be responsible. That you had to hold all the balls, control all the strings, cover all the bases, or else everything would fall apart _and_ it would be your fault.

It was mistrust. No, more subtle than that—it was an _absence_ of trust, an unwillingness to give anyone else the chance to prove themselves, because then they might screw it up. Like how a country wasn’t allowed to develop nuclear weapons until it had proven that it wouldn’t use them, and the only way to do _that_ was to have them for a while without nuking anybody.

It was Tobias, bringing Garrett onboard without asking anybody else, even if it meant splitting off from the group. It was Marco, unilaterally deciding to rescue Tidwell and not even calling one of us for help. It was me, going into the Yeerk pool that first time, alone and unprepared—the time I couldn’t remember, because I’d ended up getting myself killed. It was Cassie—

_—flinch—_

I looked around, feeling the pressure of everyone’s attention as they watched me, waiting for me to speak.

It was _everywhere_ , I realized—this thing was everywhere. It was the reason that Elfangor had come to Earth by himself with a doomsday device, instead of with an entire Andalite fleet at his back. It was the reason Visser Three had executed Aftran, rather than run the risk of letting the rest of the Yeerk civilization decide for themselves, in full possession of the facts. In a way, it was the reason this whole war had started in the first place—because neither the Yeerks nor the Andalites could trust the other species’ version of _doing it right._

And it meant that this sort of thing—Ax deciding to solve problems, without reference to anyone but himself—it was going to keep on happening, as long as each of us was ready at all times to undercut or override or go around everyone else—

Unless we figured out how to trust each other. Really _trust_ —unless we _decided_ , once and for all, that we weren’t willing to put it all on the line with every single call—that we’d rather make mistakes as a group than gamble everything on the assumption that _I, and I alone_ was the only one who saw things clearly.

Another memory floated up, from what felt like forever ago—Cassie, in her barn, the day after Elfangor. We’d been trying to sort out how we were going to do things—who was in charge, how we’d make decisions. And she’d said—

—I could hear the words in her voice, could remember exactly how they’d sounded—

_I’m not doing anything just because the four of you tell me to._

My gaze drifted toward Marco’s.

She had been right—sort of.

But it wasn’t black-or-white. It wasn’t all-or-nothing. If you were part of a team—really, truly part of it—and the vote was four-against-one—

That didn’t mean you had to just suck it up and go along. It meant that the conversation wasn’t over yet.

“There’s a thing,” I began, looking back at Ax—Ax, who’d taken a gamble, who’d risked everything for a glimmer of hope. “A thing I’ve just noticed. And it’s—I don’t know how to say it, yet. How to explain. But it’s why—”

I swallowed. “It’s why I’m going to vote that we _not_ isolate Ax, and it’s also why I’m going to go along if the group decides we _should.”_

I started talking. I said a lot of words, all in a jumble. They asked questions—all of them, including Ax, including Erek, even including Mr. Levy. They raised objections, only some of which I was able to answer. They brought up points I hadn’t considered, angles I hadn’t taken into account.

We talked about trust.

We talked about mistakes.

We talked about the war, and the future, and how to do the right thing.

We talked about fear, and doubt, and suspicion.

And then, finally, as the sky began to lighten—

“It’s my fault that the Yeerks were on alert early,” Rachel said hollowly, staring at the ground. “That the Chapmans—I went to scope out their place on that first Saturday, to see if they were—if there was any way I could—”

She broke off, chewing at her lip. “I sent a thought-speak message,” she said, her voice taut. “A threat. Pretending to be an Andalite. That’s why they—why they—”

She stuttered to a halt again, dropping her face into her hands. “I’m sorry. I screwed up.”

The silence stretched out, tense and crackling, as if charged with electricity—

“I already knew,” said Marco, “because I’ve been using morphs to skim through everybody’s memories.”

A second silence, even more deafening than the first.

And then Erek, speaking up for the first time in long, long minutes—

“Yesterday, Tobias shot down a Bug fighter on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., after which a second fighter landed and an unknown alien calling itself Esplin publicly turned itself over to the authorities.”

 

*        *        *

 

It took nearly an hour to get everyone on the same page.

Erek claimed that the Chee had withheld the information from us out of a sense that we could not be trusted—that passing along the news would inevitably lead to violence in a way their programming required them to prevent. That sense had changed, apparently, though it remained to be seen whether he was telling us the whole truth.

If he _was—_

Tobias was unconscious in an underground sanctuary in Fairfax county, Virginia, while the Chee treated him for an amputation he’d suffered when he brought down the Bug fighter. With him was the cube, a sole surviving shredder, and a twelve-year-old Controller named David Poznanski, who had been involved in some way that Tobias hadn’t explained.

The two Bug fighters had been taken in different directions—the crashed one heading south, and the functional one due west. Beyond that, the Chee didn’t know where they’d ended up, since Rictic had stayed on the scene to take care of Tobias. The blue centaur pseudolite had also gone off radar, presumably to some government black site where it was being interviewed around the clock while waiting for the President, Putin, and whoever was in charge of China these days.

Erek had used his holographic projectors to play back Rictic’s recording of the scene, together with Tobias’s report of his private conversation with Esplin. The transcript of the speech was apparently available online, along with copies of photos and videos that kept getting re-hosted as quickly as the government could shoot them down. In the twenty-or-so hours since the story had leaked—

‹Or flooded, more like.›

—no one from the White House or any reputable news source had released any definitive statements. They were openly calling it a crashed UFO on Fox news, and tongue-in-cheek calling it a crashed UFO on CNN. Marco was already planning a reconnaissance trip into town to catch up on news, steal some public wifi, and maybe buy a throwaway phone with a ton of prepaid data.

That is, unless we decided to pack up and ship out.

Esplin’s public speech left us with maybe fifty hours before he died of Kandrona starvation—

‹Are we still calling it that? I mean—that’s not a normal Yeerk, right? There’s got to be something else going on.›

‹We know that the Visser is trying to reverse-engineer the morphing technology, and we know that Erek detected Z-space radiation around his previous remote body. The most likely explanation is that he has replicated the control mechanism independent of the rest of the technology, and is using manufactured versions of the same artificial Yeerk tissue found in morphs.›

—and in his private conversation with Tobias, he’d claimed that Cassie’s parents—

‹Wait, _what?›_

—would be set free in Washington some time tomorrow. That _seemed_ to imply that there would be a second, public landing, unless Esplin was negotiating something quieter with the U.S. military. There was also his intriguing reference to a “cache of useful supplies”—

‹That’s bait.›

—off the coast of a tiny, uninhabited island two hundred miles west of Alaska.

On top of all that, Tobias had somehow managed to get some kind of private meeting with President Tyagi, a Secret Service agent, and a Homeland Security analyst—the parent of the kid, David, which was probably significant somehow—although Rictic hadn’t been in the room and hadn’t gotten many of the details before Tobias collapsed. It seemed unlikely that we’d be able to just waltz in and find the President, but we put it on the list anyway, along with _go straight to the press_ and _take over North Korea._

The back-and-forth as we debated options had been a nightmare to follow, with at least two separate threads running in parallel at all times, and sometimes as many as four or five. There were the words that people chose to say aloud, the public thought-speak band that included Ax but excluded Erek and Essak/Mr. Levy, the slightly-more-private band that was just me, Marco, Rachel, and Garrett—Garrett had given up and put on his morph armor after the first half hour—and the direct conversation between me and Marco, which mostly consisted of him outlining various ways in which we’d all gone _completely, batshit insane._

That, plus whatever chitchat was going on behind _my_ back.

But finally, as the sun began to creep above the haze-hidden horizon, we settled on a single course of action.

Or rather, _in_ action.

“Are we sure about this?” Garrett asked anxiously. His shirt wasn’t _quite_ covering his face—his fists were clutching the neckline, but for the moment his mouth was still visible over his knuckles.

“No,” Marco answered, preempting any longer replies. “But we’re not _going_ to be sure, either, and every other option’s been vetoed by at least one of us. So if we’re serious about this whole Kumbaya business—”

‹Thanks, Marco.›

“—then that’s that.”

The sticking point had been Esplin’s intentions—whether we could afford to rebuff him, if his offer of a truce turned out to be genuine. We’d gone back and forth for almost fifteen minutes, with Erek and Mr. Levy and—surprisingly—Rachel offering arguments in favor of accepting his invitation to talk, while Marco and Ax/Temrash had been ardently opposed.

“I’m sorry, are we _seriously_ entertaining the idea that there’s anything other than a one hundred percent chance that this is a trick? I mean, Erek, I know you guys are like, pathologically charitable or whatever, but seriously—the _only_ reason he’s doing all this is to salvage the situation after Tobias shot his cover story out of the sky.”

‹We must agree with Marco. This bears all of the hallmarks of a clever deception, meant to throw us into a state of indecision and paralysis. If we did not have access to Temrash and Essak and the Chee, it may even have worked, but—›

“That doesn’t mean we can’t take it at face value, though,” Rachel had countered. “Right now, he has an _extremely_ upper upper hand, but as long as he’s playing pacifist, he can’t drop rocks or assassinate anyone. If we play along, we might be able to buy ourselves some breathing room, get in touch with the right people, maybe figure out what he’s up to.”

“It’s a _big_ Earth, Rachel. If he’s doing stuff in the shadows, we’re not going to spot it. And in the meantime, the _last_ place we want to be is right where he can see us, right where he’s in control of all the dominoes.”

In the lull between sentences, though, a very different conversation was taking place.

‹Okay, so, just to be absolutely, one hundred percent clear—we _do not trust the Chee,_ right? I mean, I get what you’re pointing at with all your peace-love-and-understanding, Jake, but this is _not_ the behavior of an ally.›

‹Marco’s right,› Rachel said grimly. ‹Start with the fact that there are like a hundred and forty thousand of them, and we still don’t really know what they want besides not-violence. Also, I’m not super sure about this, but—thinking about it, I’m pretty sure that everything Erek filled us in on is stuff Tobias knows. Like, stuff Tobias is eventually going to tell us himself, someday. Nothing more. We didn’t hear anything that the Chee might have figured out on their own, only things they’d get caught for _not_ telling us.›

‹Garrett here. They _are_ helping though, right? I mean—Erek’s had our backs, out here, and it sounds like Rictic did some pretty heavy lifting for Tobias out in Washington. I know the whole secrets thing isn’t cool, but they’re not _not_ on our side. Over.›

‹World isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. They could just be along for the ride until it stops being convenient. At which point….›

As we talked, I could feel the lines solidifying, the boundary between _us_ and _them_ growing clearer with each careful misdirect, each quiet clarification. We’d ruled out St. Matthews island and the alleged prisoner dropoff as probable traps, and we knocked a visit to the Fairfax county sanctuary off the list for the same reason, though out loud we just said that it made more sense to wait until Tobias was fully recovered.

In the end, the lines ended up pretty much exactly where I would have expected them to, with Marco, Rachel, and Garrett “in,” and Erek and Mr. Levy “out.”

‹Garrett here. What about Ax? Do we trust him, or not? Over.›

I shot a hopefully-subtle glance at Marco, received a fleeting grimace in answer.

‹Look,› he whispered softly, as Mr. Levy began speculating on whether or not his bank accounts were still active. ‹I get what you’re saying, okay? I really do. Five fingers in a fist, and all that. And for sure the cowboy thing has caused a lot of headaches so far. But this—›

I saw his gaze flicker over to the Andalite. ‹Do you really want to hang everything on Ax-rash not fucking us over, in the end?› he continued. ‹Because it seems to me like this is one of those moments where you look back years later and say, _if only.›_

I took in a long, slow breath. The last time Ax had decided to take unilateral action, he’d pointed a shredder straight at my face—

_But then he handed it over to you. Willingly. And Elfangor—_

_Elfangor said he wouldn’t betray you._

I looked over at the alien cadet, at the single stalk-eye that was trained on me.

‹Temrash has plenty of reasons to want this to work,› I reminded Marco. ‹We’re his best route to vengeance for the rest of Aftran.›

‹No, a double-cross is his best route to vengeance. Using us to get to the Visser, and then jumping ship. Also, I’m pretty sure you’re biased, here, since one of the side effects of this whole situation is Tom not having a Yeerk in his head anymore.›

I winced, trying not to look over at the remaining dome. Tom had been stuck in there, incommunicado, for almost two hours—

_Not yet._

‹Yeah,› I admitted. ‹But look at it this way—this might actually _be_ the peaceful solution. If they’re willing to give up control—if they’re really just in it for the sensation and the experience—they could _all_ be passengers. Cooperators.›

‹Cooperators,› Marco echoed, and even in thought-speak, I could hear his skepticism. ‹That could just be one more way to get to the same end goal,› he pointed out. ‹You get a partial Yeerk into everybody’s head, how long do you think it’ll be before we all just decide—of our own free will, of course—that it makes more sense to go all the way?›

‹Okay, so maybe it’s not the best plan. But Ax isn’t a whole invasion. He’s a single experiment. And if this _works_ —if we can someday get Temrash back into a pool, and let the whole Yeerk species know that peace is possible—›

‹You’re grasping at straws, man. It’s been two hours. You are _way_ too ready to buy into this whole thing.›

‹So you’re vetoing, then? We keep him out of the loop?›

There was a long stretch of time during which the out-loud conversation continued, with Erek, Ax, and Mr. Levy making rough predictions about how things would play out over the next couple of days.

‹No,› Marco said finally, and something in his tone let me know that he was including Rachel and Garrett once again. ‹If you say trust him—›

He broke off. ‹Well. I trust _you,_ Fearless Leader. As long as we’re going into this thing with our eyes open. And let’s say we acquire him in a couple of days and take a look at this whole situation from the inside, yeah?›

‹That’s probably a good idea in general,› I said. ‹As long as we’re okay with him wanting to do the same to us. In fact, we should maybe _all_ swap morphs at this point?›

‹Well, if we’re not going to have _any_ secrets anymore, I might as well go ahead and confess: consoles are better than PCs, I liked the prequels more than the originals, and I’ll take regular fries over curly fries any day of the week.›

I smiled in spite of myself. ‹Monster,› I replied. And then, privately: ‹Thanks.›

‹Don’t thank me,› he shot back, his tone halfway between banter and blunt. ‹Just—be right, okay? Don’t let _this_ be the thing that gets us all killed.›

 

*        *        *

 

“You want me to stick around?”

The sun had risen, the conversations had ended, and the clearing was empty except for me, Marco, and Erek, and the bright white dome that Erek had been maintaining for the past two and a half hours. Mr. Levy had gone back to sleep, Ax had gone off to graze—with Garrett keeping an eye on him—and Rachel had morphed into an eagle and taken to the sky. The rest of the day was divvied up between rest, reconnaissance, and planning, and there was no longer any reason to hold off.

“No,” I answered, taking in a deep breath. “I think I’ve got this one.”

Marco nodded, rested a hand on my shoulder for a moment, and then turned to leave, angling off toward the nearby town. Erek watched him go, expressionless, and then swiveled his holographic face to point at me.

“Ready?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure where my reluctance was coming from—as always, when I turned my little black box on itself, I got nothing useful in response. It could have been guilt—over the fact that it was my fault Tom had been taken in the first place, or that I hadn’t done anything to rescue him afterward. It could have been guilt over what had happened to our parents, and the rest of Ventura. Or maybe I was feeling guilty about—

— _starting to notice a pattern here, maybe—_

Fine. Guilt. That was at least a partial explanation, and it wasn’t going to get any better from me sitting around stalling.

“Ready,” I said.

Erek’s arm moved, the dome vanished, and in its place stood my brother.

He was on his feet, his body tense, facing in slightly the wrong direction. He whirled as the hologram disappeared, taking in a full view of the clearing, eyes wide and head swinging frantically from side to side. When he saw that it was just me and Erek, he stopped and straightened, but his shoulders remained tense, his fists clenched.

I could see streaks of grime on his cheeks, and his eyes were red and puffy, but his voice was clear and level as he spoke. “Where is he?” he asked. “The Andalite—Ax—did he—”

“He’s still here,” I answered, resisting an impulse to hold up my hands in the sort of calming gesture that never made people calm. “He’s—we’re going to give it a shot.”

“So you’re—”

His voice cracked, and his eyes flickered almost imperceptibly back and forth. “You’re not going to make me—you’re not going to—to put it back?”

“Wh—”

_Oh._

_Oh, god._

“No,” I said, fighting to keep my own voice steady. “Never. Never, ever, _ever_ , for any reason. I’d—”

 _—die first,_ I meant to say, but before I could finish the thought, Tom broke—broke and fell forward, collapsing into me, almost knocking me over as he dissolved into enormous, heaving sobs. I staggered back, and Erek was there, steadying us both as we sank toward the ground.

For a long time, I didn’t say anything. Just held him, as he cried himself dry, emptying out everything that had built up in the—

—had it only been weeks?

Two weeks, since they took the high school. Maybe. Definitely not three.

But it was enough—enough to have shaken him, cracked him. And then on top of it, our parents—

—our grandparents—

—our aunt and uncle and cousins, Rachel’s family—

— _everybody_ —

I didn’t let go. I couldn’t, not all the way—not while they still needed me, not with Erek watching, not with Tom clinging to me like a branch in a raging river.

But I let it out, a little. Leaned into the hug. Put my head next to my brother’s, and cried along with him. Squeezed him, and let myself feel grateful that at least he was alive, at least he was free—that at least _one_ person had made it out, and was going to be okay.

Probably.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and I meant it—sorry for what he’d been through, sorry that I hadn’t been able to help, sorry that even after everything else I’d left him locked in a bubble for two and a half hours, not knowing what was going on or whether he was just going to get thrown right back into the nightmare. For weeks, he’d been a prisoner inside his own head, while I—

_Oh, come on, that’s not fair—_

I’d basically just been camping out. Keeping my head down, taking potshots, always making sure we had a way out, that we didn’t do anything too _risky._ And the whole time, my brother had been trapped, him and ten thousand other people, trapped and helpless, _hopeless—_

_Come on, you took out the pool—_

No. _Rachel_ took out the pool. _I_ sat on the sidelines. It had been Rachel and Garrett and Ax, following the plan that had been cooked up by Marco and Tidwell—Tidwell, who Marco had saved after _I_ left him to drown. And before that, Rachel had taken down Visser Three’s doombot, and Garrett and Tobias had rescued Ax, and now Tobias had lost his hand taking down a Bug figher, and Cassie—

I flinched.

Backpedaled.

Started over.

 _This is it,_ I realized, connecting the dots. The reason I’d been reluctant to look Tom in the eye, the reason I’d been having trouble sleeping, the thing that had been nagging at me all morning as we talked ourselves out of action—as _I_ talked everybody out of action, they were obviously traps and some part of me wanted to take the bait anyway, to get up and _do_ something, _anything_ other than just sit around waiting for the next crisis to hit—

It was guilt. Guilt over the fact that I hadn’t suffered, while everyone else had. Hadn’t fought and bled the way the others had. Hadn’t lost anything at all until the day before yesterday, and couldn’t even justify feeling bad about that when so many others had lost so much more—

_God, Rachel—_

I’d been in exactly _one_ battle that was any kind of serious, and I couldn’t even remember it because I’d screwed it up so badly that I’d ended up dying in morph.

 _This isn’t fair,_ a part of me tried to argue. _Not every general fights on the front lines. You’ve been holding the group together._

It wasn’t enough, though. I could feel the pressure building inside of me, feel my blood running thick and hot like lava. I needed—

_Respect?_

No.

_Revenge?_

No.

_Release?_

No—not quite. I needed—

 _Satisfaction_.

That was the word. Satisfaction, like an old timey duel. Something I could destroy, to put things back into balance. I needed to _win_ —to make them pay for what they’d done to us—to my brother, my cousin, my city, my planet. I needed to see them bleed, and to know that _I_ was the reason, the instrument of justice.

 _For Cassie,_ I thought. _Allowed_ myself to think, for the first time—that she might not have made it out, that she might already be dead. That we might never really know, never find out for sure one way or the other. I allowed myself to think it, and the anger flared up around me like a bonfire, burning up the pain and leaving behind brittle, black resolve.

Beside me, Tom’s sobs softened—slowed—tapered off into sighs and sniffles. I loosened my grip on his shoulders, and he pulled away from me, scrubbing self-consciously at the tears still leaking from his eyes.

 _And for Tom,_ I added, as we talked—as he began to ask questions, as I filled him in on what was happening, as we both avoided mention of our parents, of anything more than two days in the past. _For Tom, and for mom and dad, and for Aunt Naomi and Uncle Dan and Jordan and Sara and—_

The names kept coming, and I fed each one into the fire, just as I fed my guilt and regret over keeping Tom out of the loop—because we didn’t have the cube, didn’t have earplugs, and so my brother wasn’t _in_ , could not be one of _us_ , was still an outsider and a liability, for all that his soul was burning, too. I put him off with easy words and empty promises, told him to rest and took the pangs of shame I felt and transmuted them into fuel.

Afterward, I took to the air, flying high up into the dust-filled sky, searching my brain for answers—for some target we could hit, some weak spot Visser Three would not have reinforced, some tiny piece of information he didn’t know we knew, and therefore couldn’t predict we would exploit. I made lists in my head, pored over every detail of my memories, replayed every word I remembered Elfangor or Temrash or Essak ever saying.

And then—

“Essak. Mr. Levy. _Essak.”_

“Hmmm? Wha—Jake? What’s going on?”

“Sorry to wake you up. I just had one quick question—does the pool ship have a lot of manufacturing capability?”

“I— _what?”_

“Manufacturing. Like, if Visser Three wanted to grow a bunch of plants, or build a bunch of machinery, or something like that. Can he—you know—make stuff? In large quantities?”

“No. No, not really. He’s got—there’s a high level of technology on board, he can do a lot of fine tinkering, but nothing at scale. That’s part of what the Earth is good for—that’s why Aftran had an assembly line inside the pool facility.”

“All right, thanks.”

“But what—”

“Sorry—I’ll tell you later.”

 

*        *        *

 

‹Marco. It’s Jake. Don’t look around, don’t react. Just listen. I think I’ve got a target. It’s not a sure thing, but it’s big, it’s important, and Visser Three doesn’t know we know about it. And if I’m right, we can slow them down _and_ get proof that they’re still operating on Earth. But we need to lose Erek first.›

‹All right, Fearless Leader, I’ll bite. What are you thinking?›

‹I did some research into that oatmeal. Ralph’s brand, maple and ginger. There’s only one place that makes it—a big factory out in Iowa. It’s open, it’s isolated, and unless they pulled out _everybody—_ ›

‹—then they’re dependent on it, and that means they probably took over production.›

‹Right. You tell Rachel; I’ll find Garrett. If we’re doing this, we want to do it _now.›_

 

 

 

 


	31. Chapter 24: Rachel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The delay in this update was partially due to the Thanksgiving holiday, but MOSTLY due to my participation as a speaker in the Effective Altruism Global conference held in Oxford last weekend. I was there representing the Center for Applied Rationality, where I work as the curriculum director and one of several instructors.
> 
> If you're not familiar with either CFAR or EA, and you enjoy this story and stories like it, you may want to check out both online. EA in particular is a wide umbrella under which a growing number of smart and well-meaning people are doing a lot of high-impact work.

**Chapter 24: Rachel**

It didn’t hurt that they were surprised, when I told them no.

I mean, I _get_ it. After the high school, and the truck, and the pool— _both_ times—and after I came clean about the Chapmans, and I’m pretty sure Marco told them all about the fire, or at least he told Jake—

I know what they think of me. That I—that I’m aggressive. Violent. Bloodthirsty, even. That I like it too much, that I’m leaning into it instead of _dealing_ with stuff—that I’m starting to lose track of where the line is. That maybe down the road this is going to be a problem for me.

And who knows—maybe they’re right. I can’t see the future. And if I have to pick between denial, bargaining, acceptance, or anger, after what they did to Mom, and Jordan and Sara, and Melissa and Mr. and Mrs. Chapman and Tom and Uncle Steve and Aunt Jean and Grandpa G and Coach Aikin—

So yeah, I can see how they would’ve expected me to be basically one hundred percent down for Jake’s proposed factory-demolishing mission. I can understand them having to do a double-take, when I voted against it. That wasn’t the part that hurt.

What hurt was how surprised they were when I had good reasons.

‹I’m not saying it’s a bad idea overall,› I clarified. ‹Just that it’s—I mean, it’s stupid to rush into it, isn’t it? Weren’t we just saying this morning that Visser Three is obviously trying to put us under time pressure? And that we shouldn’t let him?›

The four of us were in a circle for what felt like the hundredth time, sitting off to one side of the clearing where we’d camped out—me, Jake, Marco, and Garrett, all in morph armor, no longer bothering to keep our private conversation a secret. On the other side of the fire pit, Tom and Mr. Levy were digging through the groceries while Ax used his tail to cut firewood. Erek was nowhere to be seen, though I doubted he’d gone far.

‹For once, we have the element of surprise,› I continued. ‹They don’t know we’re coming. We shouldn’t waste it—›

_—not again._

We didn’t have weapons—I’d pointed out—and we didn’t have backup. It was more than halfway across the country, which meant that if we tried to get it done within the next forty-eight hours, we’d have to either convince the Chee to take us there, or show up already tired. We still didn’t know for sure if there even _were_ Yeerks at the place, and while I bought that it was plausible, we didn’t have a strategy for _dealing_ with them, other than just punch-and-pray. At the very least, it seemed like we should try to get some army guys or journalists or _some_ kind of trustworthy witnesses on the scene, and that would take time, not to mention that both Tobias and Cassie were still AWOL and that Tobias had the cube—

Jake had flushed—choked—had clearly wanted to argue and had visibly stopped himself, looking simultaneously angry, embarrassed, and torn. And Marco—

Marco had flushed, too, because he _knew_ everything I was saying was true, would’ve thought of it all himself if he’d even bothered to try, but he _hadn’t_ tried, he’d just been _going along_ with it—had known that Jake’s plan was full of holes and was still going to let him get _away_ with it, just because—

And then _that_ reminded me that Jake didn’t know, that we still hadn’t done the morph-swapping thing yet, and that if we wanted to vet Temr-Ax then we needed at least a day of lead-time for the memories to encode, and whether Ax was trustworthy or not we probably wanted to know _before_ we started making complicated plans.

And that was when they’d made _that face_ one too many times, and I just—

Well. I didn’t _anything,_ because I don’t do the going-off-half-cocked thing anymore.

But it hurt. It was like—like they’d been thinking of me as some stupid tool the whole time—like I hadn’t been the reason we’d learned about the school and the hospital and the breeding program, like I hadn’t been the one to save the cube, like it didn’t matter that I’d pulled off the deception that got Illim to let us into the pool—

Like I wasn’t _competent._ Like it was surprising, in a moment when they _knew_ they were being dumb, that _I_ was any smarter.

It was one thing coming from Marco. It was another thing entirely to get it from Jake.

_Whatever. Let it go._

And I did. I was getting pretty good at that, apparently. Except that I couldn’t _quite_ stop myself from wondering whether they would bother to notice _that_ , either—

Whatever. I could be the bigger person.

‹Getting some kind of outside observers makes sense,› Marco said slowly. ‹If we’re still going through with it. And yeah, firepower wouldn’t hurt. But the obvious move there would be to go through Tobias, right? Since he’s already made contact with the President?›

‹Washington still seems about as bad as going after that cache Visser Three left in Alaska,› I countered. ‹It’s where he expects us to go—where he’s _trying_ to get us to go, based on what he told Tobias—›

‹Based on what Erek claims Rictic claims Tobias claims Visser Three said—›

‹Yeah, whatever, that, and also it’s not exactly on the way to Iowa in any case.›

‹It’s where Cassie will be headed, though,› Jake said softly. ‹If she made it out. If she’s heard the news. It’s the only obvious place to go, under the circumstances—the place where she’s most likely to expect to be able to find us.›

I bit my lip.

 _Cassie’s dead,_ a part of me wanted to say, even as another part shouted _you don’t know that,_ and a third felt like lashing out at Jake for dancing around the issue and a fourth felt a sinking feeling as we drifted back toward the same black hole of uncertainty we’d spent half the morning circling. There were arguments for and against _every_ possible course of action, if that’s what you were looking for…

‹Look, we can talk ourselves into _anything,_ › I pointed out. ‹What we should be doing is looking at what could go wrong. Cassie—›

 _—can take care of herself,_ I’d meant to say. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish the thought. Because she couldn’t, none of us could, as far as we knew she was already dead, we were _all_ pretty much dead already and the only question was how much we could accomplish on the way out—how many of them we could take with us.

‹Starting with the fact that if we do nothing, Visser Three just wins,› Marco said, filling the silence. ‹I mean—right? We’ve got to assume that the default here is Visser Three outsmarts everybody, and his plan just works.›

‹Garrett here. Tobias got through, though, didn’t he? I mean, isn’t the U.S. military probably on alert now? Especially after Ventura? Over.›

‹Doesn’t mean our job is done,› Jake said firmly.

‹But what _is_ our job?› I half-shouted, letting my frustration show through as my hands curled into fists where they rested on my knees. ‹Now that the Yeerks have gone sort-of-public—now that the President’s been filled in—I mean, what’s _our_ role now? _Especially_ given the whole secret god-alien puppetmaster thing.›

There was an only-a-little-bit-awkward silence.

‹Assassins?› Marco suggested. ‹Spies? Guerillas?›

I shifted uncomfortably on my patch of grass. That wasn’t the _point,_ it was the wrong _type_ of answer, but I couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question better…

‹More like recruiters,› I ventured. ‹Can we do any better than just getting the cube back and using it on people twenty-four hours a day?›

‹Garrett here. Giving it to the military to reverse-engineer? Over.›

‹That could take years, though, and in the meantime—›

‹The problem is,› Jake cut in wearily, ‹we don’t know what Visser Three is up to. He could’ve been a lot less honest in his little speech and still gotten away with it—›

‹Except then he would’ve run the risk of one of us exposing him.›

‹Still. He’s doing things that don’t make _sense_ , and I’m willing to bet that means _we’re_ wrong rather than _he’s_ wrong. We don’t know where he’s putting his attention, or why, and we can’t count on being able to figure it out in time to do anything about it. We need a strategy that doesn’t really interact with him—something that’s going to be useful no matter what.›

‹Which brings us back to recruitment. Right?›

‹Maybe, but we _don’t have the cube._ Tobias has it—the _Chee_ have it, really, and we don’t know if getting it back is going to be easy or not. And in the meantime, we’ve got to do _something—›_

‹ _No,›_ I snapped, throwing up my hands. ‹ _No,_ Jake—we _don’t._ That’s what I’m trying to say. _You_ want to do something. You want to hit _back._ But that’s exactly the kind of thing that I—that’s what got us here in the first place.›

‹The oatmeal factory—›

‹—is a _maybe._ It’s a _good_ maybe. But it’s not a sure thing, no matter how much you try to talk yourself into thinking that it is. And in the meantime, it puts us out in the open, puts us at risk, lets Visser Three know that we’re not buying his whole olive branch thing. And we—›

I broke off. I wasn’t sure how to say the thing I wanted to say, wasn’t quite able to put it into words. But I’d walked into this trap before, and I wasn’t about to walk into it again.

‹We can’t take on missions just because they _feel good._ Especially not the kind that could end up getting us killed. We’ve got five months before the rest of the Yeerks show up, and in the meantime he has at least one whole pool left, and we—›

I broke off again, as the words I was saying caught up to me, and I realized how they sounded from the outside. _Just because they feel good. The kind that could end up getting us killed._ I looked over at Jake, and saw a dark cloud settle over his expression, and felt a wave of frustration and impatience—

 _No. This can’t be about Cassie, either. We have to be pointed_ at _something. It has to add up to something_ real, _in the end._

‹It’s a chess game,› I said. ‹You guys play chess, right? It’s like—like a blind chess game, and we don’t know where the pieces are going to end up, what the plays are going to be. The best we can do is set ourselves up to be as strong and flexible as possible, get as many pieces out onto the board as we can. The factory isn’t a _goal,_ it’s just another _mission._ One chess piece. Maybe just a pawn. Maybe not even.›

I locked eyes with Jake, willing him to understand. _Come on, cuz. Figure me out. Help me put the words together._

It wasn’t that hitting the factory was a bad idea. It was more about the _way_ we would end up hitting it—about the way we’d pick missions, going forward. It was about making a decision about how we planned to make decisions, about getting to a place where we were acting instead of just reacting.

I could see it clearly, because it was a lesson I’d only just learned, over the past month—learned the hard way. But Jake—

‹The way the Yeerks win is by getting ahead in the resource game,› Marco said, his words hijacking my brain mid-thought. ‹More people, more intelligence, more territory, more stuff.›

‹Right,› I said, feeling something shift in the back of my mind as Marco’s words clicked into place. ‹ _Right._ Exactly—right now, Visser Three’s set up to win because the Yeerks are the only ones _trying._ The human race isn’t doing anything, because it doesn’t know it _needs_ to try.›

‹So what’s the mission statement, then?› Jake asked. ‹’Wake up, sheeple’?›

‹Yes,› I shot back. ‹ _Yes._ That’s what Visser Three is doing—don’t you see? He’s trying to put everybody _back to sleep._ After Ventura, after Washington—he knew people were going to ask questions, start poking around, so he—he just—just cut it all off. Cut off the whole process. Satisfied everyone’s curiosity, gave them all the answers—shoved them off in a totally new direction, this whole convincing story all nicely tied up in a neat little package, complete with a Bug fighter and a bunch of alien bodies as proof, and now everybody’s asking the wrong questions, and—and—at some point, the government’s going to come out and make a statement, they have to, they can’t keep quiet forever, and then everybody will be like, oh, okay, not my problem, the experts are on it, and then they won’t feel like it’s _their job to do anything,_ and then Visser Three wins because he takes the right people and meanwhile everybody’s waiting for somebody else to solve the problem—›

I could feel my heart beating faster in my chest, something deep and ancient and powerful waking up inside my soul. Every now and then, there would be a glimmer in the lump of memories that I’d picked up at the high school, some hint or thread that let me draw out truths I didn’t have any right to know—

—and this _fit._ It wasn’t a complete explanation, but it was Visser Three to a T.

And our response—

A memory floated up, unbidden—of the cages, that first time, when I’d gone in after Jake and Marco had gotten out. The man who’d sworn he was going to fill up the pool with salt, the woman who’d been shouting out to everyone that they could take back control—that if enough of them fought, and fought hard enough, they could blow the Yeerks’ cover. The people who’d lined up as human shields when I made my request, to give the ones with tactical information a little more time to get it out.

The ones who weren’t sitting around waiting for someone else to save them.

‹We’re not going to win this thing on our own,› I said. ‹We never were, not once it got past one pool, one city. But we can—we can _pay it forward,_ what Elfangor did for us. We can give people what they need to win it for themselves.›

‹Okay, sure, fine—yes to all of that,› Marco interjected. ‹But hitting the factory is actually a _good_ step on that path. If it’s actually being run by Yeerks, and if we can get some proof to show everybody.›

‹I didn’t say we shouldn’t do it,› I growled. ‹It’s worth getting the oatmeal out of the picture even if the place _isn’t_ run by Yeerks. I just said we shouldn’t do it with zero prep, and only because we’re pissed off. We should be pointed _at_ something.›

Jake flushed again, but his face didn’t soften. ‹Right,› he said tightly. ‹So this is the new plan, then? Going public?›

‹Arming the human race,› I corrected. ‹Maybe that means going all the way public, and maybe it just means spreading the news around in the right circles. But that’s where we should start. It’s better than just punching whatever looks punchable, and it’s better than sitting back while Visser Three—and that thing you guys met in the pool—do whatever the hell they want.›

We should’ve done it weeks ago, to be honest—should’ve gotten started on the first day, or the day after I’d seen the resistance in the cages, or the instant we figured out that we could use morphs to vet people. As soon as it became clear that, one way or another, the war wasn’t going to stay secret, and there was going to be blood.

But we just—

—hadn’t.

_Why not?_

Because—

Because—

_Because we thought it would end up getting a lot of people killed. Because we didn’t want to take risks. Because we weren’t willing to give up control while our own families were in the line of fire._

Because it hadn’t fit with our picture of _how things work_ —that we couldn’t really change things, on a global scale. That we weren’t allowed to, somehow, that that’s what governments and militaries—grownups, in other words—were for.

We’d taken on the mantle of heroes, but not _super_ heroes. We’d fought for Ventura, but we hadn’t fought for Earth.

And now Ventura was gone, along with practically everyone I’d ever cared about. Only Jake was left—and Cassie, if I was being optimistic.

Something tickled at the back of my mind, then—half a sentence that was trying to finish itself. _If we fight for the Earth—_

But Jake interrupted the thought, speaking aloud. “All right,” he said, looking around at the three of us. “So that’s our mission statement, then. Our guiding star.”

“Polaris,” Garrett blurted, his fingers twitching where they gripped his jeans.

Across the clearing, Tom and Mr. Levy were watching, open curiosity written across their faces.

Jake nodded tightly. “Sure. Our Polaris.” He swept his gaze around the circle, locking eyes with each of us in turn. ‹This is a big deal,› he said, switching back to thought-speak. ‹A big change. It’d mean—it’s going to put a lot of chaos into the mix. If we do this, we’re—›

He paused, and gave a sickly, twisted grimace. ‹Well. I was _going_ to say, we’re not going to be in control anymore. But what else is new, right?›

He looked over at Ax—or maybe at Tom, I couldn’t tell—and the grimace disappeared, melting into slack-jawed weariness.

I felt a wash of thick, complex emotion—

—impatience—

—frustration—

—bitterness—

—a lack of sympathy for his exhaustion, his disappointment, his pessimism. As if something had been stolen from him, when I refused to go along with his stupid, self-gratifying plan.

 _Not my fault you were hoping for a rubber stamp,_ I thought, even as a more honest part of me noted that I wasn’t being fair, that I was jumping to conclusions—that once again, I was looking for reasons to be angry—

Whatever.

I just wanted him to _skip ahead_. To skip to the end, get whatever emotional processing he needed to do out of the way, so we could get back to work.

 _You need to grieve too, you know,_ said a wrong voice in the back of my head.

I ignored it.

‹All right,› Jake repeated, sounding empty and beaten. ‹Yea or nay—we wait a day, make sure we can trust Ax, take a look at this plan again after we’ve slept on it. And in the meantime, we assume—what—factory next week, and Tobias after that?›

‹We don’t have to decide that yet,› Marco pointed out. ‹One thing at a time.›

‹Fine. Morph-swap tomorrow, then planning, hopefully with Ax. Agreed?›

‹Yea.›

‹Garrett here. Yea. Over.›

‹Yea,› I said firmly.

‹Done.›

And then, feeling anticlimactic, we stood, and stretched, and went nowhere.

 

*        *        *

 

Marco had insisted that he be first.

“You don’t understand,” he’d growled—a day before, so that the memory would be preserved, would be a part of our morphs. “You don’t know what it’s like to kill somebody by demorphing them away. You start with me, and at least I won’t fight it. I’ve done this enough times.”

He’d shot me a warning look, which I’d interpreted to mean something like _shut up, don’t make this complicated._ He knew that I’d dipped into his head before, and that I’d flipped through the memories of Tidwell and Morales—that I, at least, _did_ know what it was like.

But it was irrelevant to the point he was trying to make, so I’d kept my mouth shut.

We had left the green-brown hills of southern California the following morning and headed east, Erek pacing us down below as we flew side-by-side in identical snipe morphs—free from interference, thanks to Cassie’s absence. We’d covered something like seven hundred miles over the course of the day, an hour at a time, with Jake and Garrett carrying Tom and Mr. Levy inside their morphs and Marco and I splitting the supplies, the constant morphing keeping exhaustion at bay as our real bodies aged only three or four minutes per hour.

It was maybe midnight by the time the moon rose, backlighting the dust that filled the sky over northern New Mexico, and we settled by silent, mutual agreement on top of a shattered sandstone mesa in the middle of the wide, cold nothingness.

No one spoke as we demorphed, our bodies rising shivering from the uneven rock. There was a kind of supernatural seriousness in the air—a ritual silence, dark and heavy, the sort of thing I’d imagine feeling at Stonehenge or the pyramids or those sacred catacombs in India. Words just—didn’t fit. Weren’t appropriate.

There was a soft _crunch_ as something invisible landed at the edge of the pillar, and suddenly the air around us grew warm as Erek dropped his holographic camouflage and expanded his force field to include us all. I looked at Jake, who looked at Marco, who looked at Garrett—who for once kept his eyes up and looked back—and slowly we mingled and drifted, acquiring one another, dipping in and out of the strange alien trance as the technology did its work.

“Me, too,” whispered Tom, and as one we turned to Jake, who nodded grimly. Five fingers reached out to rest gently on my cousin’s outstretched arm, and then it was done, and we found ourselves in yet another circle, this one including all eight of us—the alien, the robot, and the Controller; the survivor and the orphan; the general, the strategist, and—

_Go ahead. Might as well think it, as long as you’re being poetic._

Gritting my teeth, I buried the thought.

For a moment, all was still, an edge of anticipation forming beneath the somber ambience. I shot a glance at Marco, saw his expression in the otherworldly glow—flat and controlled, letting nothing show—and I wondered whether he was afraid, whether it made any difference that he’d probably already had this conversation with each of us in his own head, whether his insistence on going first had been courage or just a desire to _get it over with._

Marco didn’t look at _me,_ of course. He was too busy not looking at Jake.

Jake, who didn’t look scared at all, only alert and determined.

 _And what about_ you _, Rachel? How’s the warrior feeling?_

I felt my face tighten. I didn’t _think_ I was nervous, or scared. I had just as many embarrassing secrets as the rest of them, but—

—well—

—I had _just as many,_ probably _._ Probably not more. And nothing that I was _ashamed_ of, nothing that would bother me to have the others know about. If Cassie had been there, maybe—

But she wasn’t. She wasn’t, and she wasn’t _going_ to be, maybe Jake was still willing to dump energy into hope and optimism, but I wasn’t about to waste any more—

“Now,” Jake said, the word like a twig snapping in the darkness.

Shoving aside my other thoughts, I focused on Marco—on _this_ Marco, on the version of Marco I’d acquired just seconds before, the one that had memories stretching all the way up to yesterday evening. Around the circle, half of us were changing—Jake and Garrett and I morphing inside of our clothes, Ax pulling a towel over himself—while Tom and Erek and Mr. Levy and the real Marco looked on in silence.

Ninety seconds later, it was done.

“Now,” Jake said again, this time speaking with Marco’s voice, the words emerging from Marco’s face. Together, we took in one last breath—

_Click._

It was different than it had been the first time, when he’d checked his hand for rocks, counted doubles, tried to move his feet. This time, the Marco in my head was ready—took in the scene at a glance and spoke without hesitation.

‹Who’s there?› he asked, and by the faces of the others I could see that they were hearing the same question.

‹Rachel,› I said.

There was the sensation of a sigh, somewhere in between relief and disappointment. ‹Would you mind…?› he asked.

‹That one,› I answered, directing my eyes at the Marco who was Jake.

‹Thanks.›

There was a long silence as we went our separate ways inside our shared skull, Marco turning his attention outward while I looked within.

At the real Marco’s recommendation, we’d each prepared a list of five things we wanted to draw everyone’s attention to—five important thoughts or memories that would be a starting point during our sort-of mind-meld sort-of ritual. Slowly, carefully, I dipped into Marco’s memory, skimming over the list while he remained laser-focused on the emotions flickering across the face of his fellow clone.

‹It’s going to be okay, you know,› I said softly, as I skipped the familiar first item and sank into the second—his frantic escape from the tunnels under the YMCA, carrying Jake over his shoulder. ‹It’s not going to matter to him one way or another.›

‹That—doesn’t help,› Marco said, and with his whole mind unfolded before me, I was able to fill in the meaning behind the words—to see that apathy would hurt just as much as rejection, revulsion—would be _worse,_ actually, because at least if Jake was repulsed it would _mean_ something, would mean that Marco _mattered_ —

‹Okay, fine, you’re right, that came out wrong,› I said, cutting off the flow of words. Elsewhere in my head, I felt the memory of pain as a Dracon beam cut into my shoulder, drank in the raw power of the gorilla as I ripped the door off a cage and hurled it across the room. ‹But he’s not going to stop being your friend or anything like that—›

‹It’s not _about_ that,› Marco shot back, and beneath his rigidly enforced calm, his tension and anxiety were like twin currents pulsing through razor wire. ‹It’s—›

He didn’t explain in words, but instead surfaced a swirl of images, memories and emotions and chains of reasoning all jumbled together into a tangled mess.

Jake could reject him outright.

Jake could _pretend_ it didn’t matter, but be lying—either to Marco, or to himself.

Jake could try to _make_ it okay—could _force_ himself not to mind, and not realize until months or years later that he’d just been _playing the part_ of an accepting, understanding, open-minded friend.

Or worse, the whole thing could devolve into pity, patronage, condescension—could easily, accidentally, irrevocably turn into a story about Marco being fragile, being needy, being somehow less than an equal in their friendship. It could end up displacing everything else, become the thing their friendship was _about,_ and things might never be the same again.

All of this and more was there, just beneath the surface—fear and shame and pride and stubbornness, resolution corroded by secret hope and then scoured clean by self-loathing, the whole thing held back by a wall of pure, unyielding willpower—an iron determination that this _not_ matter, that he would _not allow_ the universe to drag him under over something so stupid, so pointless, so trivial, so pathetic.

So _small_.

‹Um—› I began.

‹Don’t say it,› he bit out. ‹Don’t you fucking say it, Rachel, I swear to god.›

So I didn’t.

But that didn’t stop me from _thinking_ it.

_It’s not just me, right? There’s something deeply sad about—about—_

About Marco being so scared of my cousin’s reaction that he’d rather erase his own emotions—that if there was a button he could push to _not_ feel so strongly—to not care—that he would push it, and call it an improvement. That he thought it made him small, and weak, and pathetic—that it was a lessening of who he was. That he’d already given up—not just on Jake returning the sentiment, but on Jake feeling _anything_ good in return—on Jake even being _capable_ of taking it in a way that was healthy, that let them stay friends.

He was just that sure that the universe was broken. It wasn’t optimism, that had led him to select that as his first thought, the first thing to draw Jake’s attention to. It was _fuck it, why not._ It was a desire to just go ahead and get the worst part over with.

_Maybe he’s right._

The thought hit me like a splash of cold water, interrupting the flow of sympathy and yanking me back out into the real world. For a few minutes, I’d been so absorbed in the experience of being Marco that I’d let go of the larger picture—of the Yeerks, and the Visser, and the war Elfangor had dumped in our laps. Of the ashes behind us, the crater that had once been my home and everything I’d ever cared about. Of what had happened to Melissa, and maybe Cassie too—of what would happen to everybody, unless we managed to pull off a miracle.

‹There’s just—there’s more important shit to worry about, in the end,› Marco said offhandedly, even as he continued to drink in every detail of Jake-Marco’s expression. ‹For you guys, anyway. For me—›

He gave a bitter, humorless laugh, leaving the sentence unfinished for me to complete.

_For me, I’m going to die in like half an hour, so I might as well worry about whatever the fuck I want._

 

*        *        *

 

I had expected the morph-swapping experience to be surprising. I mean, I’d done it before—more than once—but this was different. These weren’t random Controllers, they were my friends. My allies. The closest people I had left. And unlike when I’d used Marco’s morph in the past, _this_ time there was no specific question to be answered, no deadline to meet. We were going into it just to get to know one another better—to understand each other on the deepest possible level, to literally see through one another’s eyes.

Yet even going into it with that context, it was—

_Profound._

Startling. Unexpected. _Moving._ It sort of snuck up on me, with Marco—the way we eased into it, given our past experiences, given those first few minutes.

But his other memories—

They’d been like—like shards of crystal, fragments of rainbow, lit up with a vibrant _trueness_ that had been even brighter than my own anger, drawing me closer and closer until I was fully outside of myself.

There had been the day of his tenth birthday, when his mother had taken him and Jake out on the open water, and he’d taken the tiller and sailed them out of sight of land entirely without help, tacking against the wind.

There’d been the time he had gotten in a tussle with a girl during P.E.—she had tried to trip him twice as they passed each other on the track, going in opposite directions, and on the third pass he’d stuck out an elbow, and she’d stumbled and claimed he’d punched her in the chest unprovoked, and his father hadn’t believed him, had screamed and shouted, and he’d spent two afternoons in detention in a burning mix of shame and rage.

There’d been the book his dad had given him, not long after— _Labyrinths of Reason,_ which he’d read in a week and then reread in an afternoon, curled up in the back of his family’s station wagon on the way to his aunt’s wedding. It had a puzzle in it that he’d tried to solve for days, that he’d been _sure_ was impossible, and then the book had shown him a solution that turned his brain inside out and he’d seen the world differently ever since.

And the rest—I hadn’t _meant_ to pry, had not at first held any intention of going beyond his original list of five, but the thirty minutes we’d settled on hadn’t been up yet, and he’d pointed out that this was why we were doing this, after all—

Memories of times when everyone else around him had been crazy, had been stupid, and he was the only one who saw but they wouldn’t _listen—_

Memories of the times when _he_ was the one who was wrong—when he’d missed something, gotten it backwards, jumped to conclusions and was arrogant and condescending right up until the moment when it all came crashing down—

Memories of his mother, and the day she disappeared, and the week of wondering—not knowing— _hoping—_ and then they’d found the shattered wreck of her boat and that had been that, only his father couldn’t let go, the nightmare was just _beginning—_

And then it had been time to demorph, and Jake had said nothing, not a single word, had only stood up and pulled the real Marco into a hug and said “Me next,” and we’d sat back down and for the first time I’d really _seen_ my cousin, how alike we were—the pain and rage he couldn’t really feel, didn’t even _notice_ , because it didn’t feel like a part of you—just felt like it was a part of the universe, the same way that gravity pulled down—

And I’d felt something weakening inside of me, some barrier crumbling, so that when I got to his memories of Cassie, I’d almost thought they were _mine,_ had almost thought that Marco wasn’t the only one, because the awe and admiration were all so familiar, so immediate and present, and the budding love that went with them felt so natural that at first I didn’t notice it was coming from Jake and not from me.

And then I saw myself from the outside—saw _all_ of us from the outside, as I relived Jake’s resurrection, felt his confusion and horror as the truth of what had happened sank in, and then his frantic desperation as Ax went off the rails and he tried to stop him from shooting anybody, tried to hold us all together. I felt the weight of responsibility, the strange intermittent magic of what he called his little black box, the fear that it would all go wrong and it would all be his fault. I watched myself through his eyes—thumbed through memories where he considered me, weighed me, sent me out on missions and then worried about me.

And then it was on to Ax, whose head was an incomprehensible, alien place, containing not only him but also—I had forgotten—a complete and independent copy of Elfangor. I had followed the path Ax had laid out for me, from his time on the Andalite homeworld to his training in the orbital battle school to the moment when he chose to defy his orders and stow away on his brother’s ship, and as I looked around the circle, I could see that the others were just as horrified as I was by the unraveling he had experienced—that yes, joining with Temrash _had_ been his only option, and the correct choice, and as far as we could tell, seeing things from only Ax’s point of view, their fragile alliance was genuine, and the pair of them were trustworthy.

After that, it was time to become Garrett, whose mind was almost as strange, whose life—I discovered—was like one of those movies where everything is black and white except for one color. Only for Garrett everything was black and white except for _all_ the colors, which doesn’t quite make sense but was as close as I could come to summing up the experience. In memory after memory, everything was bright, everything was urgent, everything was deeply and immediately attention-grabbing regardless of whether it was actually important. I had to close my eyes just to stay focused—otherwise I’d get sidetracked by the pattern of shadows in the pockmarked stone, or the sound of an owl in the darkness, or the subtle differences in the expressions of the other four Garretts—and even then it was _still_ like being thrown overboard in the middle of a hurricane—

—a comparison I could _actually make,_ because of what Garrett and Tobias had gone through when they went to rescue Ax, _why hadn’t they told us it was like that—_

—and it made _perfect sense_ that Garrett fixated on certain NAMES and OBJECTS, because without _some_ kind of anchor, I would have been surprised if he ever managed to finish a single thought.

And yet, whether it was because by that point my defenses had all been washed away, or just because it was _true—_

I found it incredibly easy to see myself in Garrett, and to see Garrett in me. To understand what it was like to be him, why he did the things he did—to imagine myself doing the same, in his place. He was no more alien than Jake or Marco had been—in fact, all of them, even Ax, had been—

—had been—

_Normal?_

No, not normal. _Fascinating._

Brilliant, riveting, beautiful. I didn’t want to admit it, because of what it implied about before, about the past, about my whole life up until an hour and a half ago. That I’d basically been writing off the people around me, even the ones that I liked, even the ones that I _trusted_ —that I’d been summing them up, flattening them out, storing them in my mind as cartoon characters rather than as full, three-dimensional people. I could feel myself shifting into a new sort of reality where other people _actually existed,_ as players instead of as background characters, people whose incomprehensible behavior wasn’t the product of broken or mysterious thinking processes, but of brains that were only a little bit different from mine. I wondered if Marco was experiencing the same thing—the same shift in perspective, the same sense of connection, of kinship. I wondered if this was what Jake’s life was _always_ like, if this was the thing that powered his little black box. And then I thought of Cassie, who’d probably felt this way all along—

—and then it hit me, _really_ hit me, what it would mean if Cassie hadn’t made it, if she were dead and gone and somebody _that special,_ as special as Marco and Jake and Ax and Garrett, _more_ special, maybe—

—and my mom, and my sisters, and Melissa—

— _all_ of the people in Ventura—

—it cut right to the heart of me, right past all of my anger and determination, the armor I’d been using to hold myself together, keep myself from falling apart—hit me right in the gut without anything to slow it down or soften the blow and I almost lost it right there, would’ve fallen over or started crying if it hadn’t been for the fact that Garrett was in control of our shared body, that I’d unlocked him and turned over the keys while I poked through his soul—

Dead. Half a _million_ of them, dead, when even one death was a tragedy of near-infinite proportions, there was a person inside me named Greg Morales who was _gone,_ who’d lived alone in a house that was too big for him, I didn’t know who he’d really been or what he’d wanted out of life but it was irrelevant now, everything he might have done, everything he might have stood for was over, gone, vaporized—

I felt a part of me trying to shrug it off—to regain perspective, take the bird’s-eye view, the defensive distance in which a couple of people died every second and you didn’t notice, _shouldn’t_ notice, because that was normal, paying attention didn’t help _,_ there wasn’t really anything to be done about it—

 _But even if that’s true, this is different. This wasn’t old age or sickness, it wasn’t a car accident or a falling tree branch, this was_ murder—

— _like the seven Controllers you killed that first time at the pool? Or that kid Controller you cut to pieces? Or_ everyone _at the pool the second time?_

—and it was clear, the moral argument was clear, we were doing what we had to do to end a war that somebody else had started, it wasn’t the same thing at all, but still—all of a sudden the cost was _visible_ to me, _meant_ something in a way that I deliberately hadn’t let it, up until now, and suddenly I realized why the characters in comic books and action movies never had parents or siblings, had at most one person that they really, truly cared about, because once you had something _other_ than the fight to focus on, it became that much harder to do what had to be done, to follow through—

‹Rachel?›

—I thought about the five memories _I’d_ chosen, the things I wanted the others to see and understand about _me_ , from my first loss at my first gymnastics competition all the way up to what had happened after the high school, I’d _known_ that Visser Three was going to come for my family, for all of our families, but I hadn’t let it get in the way because what mattered was the _cube_ , the cube was our number-one route to victory and Elfangor had said that it had to be kept out of the Yeerks’ hands _at all costs_ —

‹Rachel—›

—at all costs, that meant no matter what, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how much you lost, no matter if it meant that they were going to take both of your little sisters and turn them into slaves and you could have stopped it, it didn’t make any difference, you _did what you had to do_ and whining about it wasn’t going to change anything, that was what I believed all the way down in my core, and it was like being stabbed with a hot knife because it was one thing to say _at all costs_ and it was another thing to stare straight at just how big the cost actually was, half a million people and counting and I was on my own now, both of my best friends were gone and my family was gone and the others all thought I was stupid or dangerous—

‹ _Rachel!›_

I snapped out of it, looked around the circle and saw that the others were all demorphing, were already halfway demorphed.

‹You okay in there?›

‹I’m fine,› I said evenly, pulling my shirt back down from where it had been covering my nose and mouth. Then I said some other lies as I demorphed, shutting down the Garrett inside my head so he wouldn’t be conscious during the process. Then it was my turn, and while the others went digging through yesterday’s Rachel, I tried to realign the pieces and put myself back together.

_What’s our role now?_

I looked slowly around the circle, seeing my own face mirrored back at me in the darkness, looking subtly wrong, subtly different, the way a photograph was different from a reflection. I had asked the question the day before, and no one had really had an answer.

But that wasn’t the only thing that needed figuring out. And now that I’d seen—really _seen_ —what it was to be Jake, to be Marco, to be Garrett or Ax—

 _What’s_ my _role now?_

I wasn’t any harder or stronger than the rest of them. Not really, not in the ways I’d thought I was. And I didn’t see things any more clearly—I just saw _different_ things. It was easy to see that a group of just-Rachels wouldn’t have done any better, and would almost certainly have done a lot worse.

_But what about a group of just-Jakes? Just-Marcos?_

No, that wasn’t the question, either. It wasn’t about which one of us was _best,_ it was about how we _fit together._

What was it that I could do that they couldn’t?

 _Hold together,_ my brain offered up.

That wasn’t quite it, but it was close. It was more like—

Like—

Like I didn’t _stop moving_ when I fell apart. Like the cracks never made it all the way to my core, to my motivation—like it never hit me hard enough to keep me from finishing the job. Even when it looked like Jake wasn’t going to make it, even after our families had been taken, even when they’d blown up the shield generator and knocked out Ax and it was just me and Garrett against a hundred Hork-Bajir with Dracon beams—

Even yesterday, when Jake and Marco had been giving each other permission to go off the rails. I made mistakes, sure—more than either of them—but I didn’t make the same mistake twice. I had—

_Follow-through._

Yeah. That was it.

Follow-through.

It was a more comfortable word than _warrior—_ less pretentious, less likely to make my inner Marco start smirking. And with that as my superpower—next to Marco’s raw intelligence, or Jake’s weird ability to understand people—that made me—

_The reliable one._

The one who wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty. Who wasn’t going to back down just because it was hopeless. The one who was willing to do whatever it took.

_The type of person who does the right thing, even if it’s hard._

Yeah, that fit. That was another thing I had seen in Garrett, even before our little brain-swap—that he, too, was somebody with follow-through.

And suddenly it all made sense—the feeling of aliveness I got during battle, the way in which I—more than any of the others—had taken to our new life like a duck to water. The way in which I would have been _happy,_ now, if the cost hadn’t been so high—happier than I ever would have been normally.

It wasn’t that I _liked violence_ , or that I had anger issues, or anything like that.

It wasn’t that I was broken.

It was that, if your superpower was _follow-through_ , then your life was only as meaningful as the problem in front of you.

I’d been a damn good gymnast, even after it was clear I was too tall. I’d pushed and fought and worked and sweated for _years,_ until I was as good as anybody in Southern California, to the point that Dad had started talking about sending me to Massachusetts to work with Belnikoff.

But in the end—

What did it matter?

Gymnastics wasn’t going to change the world.

_The part of me that’s excited—the part of me that loves this—_

That was the part of me that knew that I had finally found something worth trying my absolute hardest. Finally found something worth sacrificing for. Worth _dying_ for, if it came to that. Through fate or luck or divine intervention, I’d ended up in a position where not giving up might actually _mean_ something. Might make the difference between a saved world and a doomed one.

 _That_ was my role—that was how I fit in. Especially now that I had nothing to lose, now that I was more alone than all of them. Jake had Tom, Marco had his dad, Garrett and Tobias had each other, Ax had Temrash and the imaginary Elfangor in his head. Even Cassie, if she’d made it—Cassie had her parents, Visser Three had said they were alive and it didn’t really make sense for him to be lying in this case.

But me—

The only thing I really had to fight for was victory. That would be my prize, in the end—knowing that it had mattered, that _I_ had mattered, that the world was different because of the choices I’d made. That if there ever came a time when we needed one person to stay behind to buy everybody else enough time to escape, I was ready. Not because I was worth _less_ than the others, but because if one Rachel could buy a Jake, a Marco, a Garrett, _and_ an Ax—not to mention a Tobias and a Cassie—

Well. We were trying to win a war. What were the odds I could make a better trade than that?

 

*        *        *

 

If it weren’t for the fact that Temrash was keeping Ax from losing his mind—if it weren’t for the fact that Aftran had eventually learned, and started to soften—

‹Cube first,› I broadcast privately, breaking the silence.

Across the circle, the Tom-that-was-Jake nodded tightly, streaks of soft light on his cheeks where his tears reflected the dim glow of the moon.

It was thin—thin in the same way that Jake’s plan to hit the oatmeal factory had been thin. It was emotion rather than reason, reaction rather than strategy, and my inner Marco was making a skeptical face.

But this had nothing to do with winning or losing, was on an entirely different axis. It would only cost us a day or two, we needed to reconnect with Tobias anyway, and Tom—

Gritting my teeth, I turned inward again, and continued to learn about my enemy.

Tom would follow through, too.

 

*        *        *

 

‹Let us know if you think you’re going to go out of thought-speak range.›

‹Roger,› I answered.

We were walking up the driveway of a perfectly normal-looking house in the middle of a perfectly normal-looking suburb, maybe six or seven miles west of Washington, D.C.—me, Garrett, and Erek. None of us were wearing our true faces; Erek had donned a hologram of a twenty-something college girl, and Garrett and I were in human morphs.

Jake and Marco were nearby, somewhere, with Marco keeping watch in osprey morph and Jake ready to switch into any number of appropriate bodies, from rhino to tiger to tarantula hawk. We’d left Tom and Mr. Levy on the outskirts of town, supervised by another Chee who’d appeared as soon as we crossed the state line into Virginia.

Marco hadn’t been particularly happy about that.

“Look,” Erek said, as we stepped up onto the small porch. “I get that you guys are nervous. I can tell you don’t trust us yet. But really—we’re _on your side._ I don’t know what else we can do to prove it to you.”

‹Don’t answer that.›

I shared a glance with Garrett, who was currently occupying the body of a grizzled-looking middle-aged man, and we both grimaced.

“It’s not you,” I said softly, trying to ease the tension. “It’s just the general idea of going somewhere where somebody else has complete and total power over you. I’d be nervous if it was Andalites, too.”

Erek opened his mouth as if to respond, but before he could, the front door swept open, revealing a woman with dark brown hair and a flowery skirt whose whole appearance just screamed _soccer mom._

“Well, all the more reason for us to get to know each other better,” she said, smiling widely as she stepped back and gestured us inside.

I shivered, even as Marco whispered ‹Okay, _that’s_ creepy,› from his hidden perch in the nearby trees. But I didn’t hesitate.

One way or another, we had to know.

The house looked completely normal inside. Normal furniture, normal lights, normal dishes in a normal sink in the kitchen around the corner. There was a living room on the opposite side, with a normal TV on mute, showing CNN’s latest updates on “the diplomatic situation”—

—the leaders of Russia, China, India, Japan, Germany, the U.K., France, Israel, Canada, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia—plus the President, the Pope, and the Dalai Lama—had all made simultaneous statements around the time that we were crossing the Mississippi, essentially confirming everything that had happened in Washington, and the whole world had gone into a tailspin of panic and speculation—

—it still felt _weird_ to be completely disconnected from all of that, weird and wrong on a fundamental level, and I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that we were making a mistake, that we should be trying to infiltrate the major governments, get a sense of what was happening in the geopolitical sphere. But as Ax had pointed out, we couldn’t be unpredictable unless we were willing to pass on the most predictable targets, no matter how tempting and reasonable they seemed—

—and in the hallway there were two dogs, a Labrador mix and a fat little terrier. The Lab rolled over on its back and Garrett crouched to rub its belly while the terrier scampered forward to sniff at my shoes.

“You like dogs?” the woman asked, directing her question at Garrett. Behind us, Erek stepped inside and shut the door with a click.

“I like most animals,” Garrett said matter-of-factly, reaching up to scratch the Lab under its collar.

“But dogs, do you like dogs?”

“Yes,” Garrett answered. “Dogs make sense.”

The woman smiled again, nodding as if Garrett had just said something profound, and gestured further into the house. “Would you like anything to eat or drink?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” I said. “We’d mostly like to talk to Tobias, if that’s okay.”

Still smiling, she turned and led us through the kitchen, Erek bringing up the rear. Once again, the total normalcy of the scenery was slightly off-putting—I don’t know what, exactly, I’d been expecting from a hidden robot lair, but it wasn’t shopping lists on the refrigerator and an open box of Wheaties on the counter top. There was a giant double trough of dog food and water in the corner, and the terrier abandoned my shoes to go get a drink as we turned the corner into another hallway.

“This way,” the woman said, opening what seemed like a closet door to reveal narrow, wooden stairs leading down into a dimly lit basement.

‹Marco,› I broadcast. ‹We’re heading underground.›

‹Roger.›

The woman paused when she reached the bottom of the stairs, moving slightly out of the way and gesturing for us to pass her. We stepped out into the middle of the concrete floor, and then—

“Don’t be alarmed.”

—the floor began to drop, the entire slab of concrete slowly sinking as the walls and ceiling rose above us, revealing slick, featureless metal.

‹ _Way_ underground,› I added. ‹The basement is some kind of elevator shaft. I can’t tell if we’re going to stay in range or—›

“Excuse me,” Garrett said. “How far down are we going?”

“About seventy feet,” Erek answered. “Little over five stories.”

‹Never mind,› I grumbled. ‹Looks like we should easily stay in range.›

‹Roger,› Marco said again. There was a pause. ‹Jake says same rule anyway.›

If we lost contact for any unexplained reason, one of them would leave immediately, and the other would wait for half an hour and then bail. It wasn’t _really_ security—at this point, we were basically committed, and the Chee could probably round us all up in about eight seconds anyway—but it felt better to have _some_ kind of plan.

With a slight lurch, the floor stopped, and almost immediately, one of the empty gray walls began to glow with a kind of golden light. The light brightened until it was almost too bright to look at, and then—

 _MY basement doesn’t do that,_ quipped my shoulder Marco.

I couldn’t help it. A part of me tried to hang on to combat readiness, but the rest of me just sort of stared in amazement.

“Is—is this a hologram?” I stammered.

Erek projected a wide, delighted smile. “Nope,” he said. “Only the sky.”

The wall had disappeared, revealing a vast, vast chamber beyond it, lit with the same warm, golden glow. The far wall was maybe two hundred yards away, only partially visible through low, rolling hills and wide, feathery trees. The whole space was like a park, with grass and streams and flowers and bees and butterflies under a sky of deep turquoise and cotton candy clouds. Walking here and there were Chee—Chee in their natural forms, six-limbed machines of shining chrome and polished ivory.

But it wasn’t the presence of robots that was the real shock.

It was the _dogs._

Hundreds of dogs, maybe even a thousand—normal, everyday Earth dogs, every breed and half-breed you could imagine, running in packs, yipping, yapping, bow-wowing, howling, growling, ruff-ruffing dogs. They were chasing squirrels, digging holes, running around with sticks, smelling each other, and generally having a grand ol’ dog time.

“What— _how_ —” I asked, as Garrett stepped forward and knelt in front of a passel of Corgis and Shibas that had tumbled to a stop just beyond the concrete.

“Welcome,” said Erek, as he gently nudged me forward. “I imagine you have some questions.”

 

*        *        *

 

In the end, it didn’t take long to explain.

“Once we realized that the Howlers couldn’t be stopped,” Erek said, “we loaded as many survivors as we could into the _New Day’s Dawn_ and made for orbit. One of us—the first Chee— _did_ something, we don’t know what, and—”

Erek’s voice hitched, a pause almost too short to be noticeable.

“—it died, went offline and never came back, but one of the Howler ships blocking the way veered off course, smashed into another one, made a hole big enough for us to escape. When the other Howlers didn’t follow, we thought that we were free, that we’d made it to safety, but—”

Another hitch, another microscopic hesitation.

“—it was only a few days later that the first Pemalites started to get sick.”

“Biological weapons,” I said softly.

“Yes. It had been the Howlers’ _first_ move, as it turned out—they’d seeded the atmosphere with a plague that took weeks to incubate. The rest of it—the burning, the killing, the torture—that was just because they liked it.”

I clenched my jaw, clamping down on the question I wanted to ask—

_Why didn’t you fight BACK?_

From what Erek had told us, sitting on the grass next to Tobias’s hospital bed, the Howlers hadn’t been more technologically advanced than the Pemalites. They hadn’t been smarter, or faster, or better equipped. They’d just been more brutal, more relentless, the Pemalites unwilling to do anything but fall back, defend, and fall back again as each layer of their defenses was breached. If the Pemalites had just unlocked their army of invincible robots—

_This, too, is a lesson._

But as I looked around the park, at the hundreds of dogs barking and gamboling in the golden light, I could sort of see it. The way in which that wouldn’t have been an answer, would have just been defeat of a different form. It wasn’t something I would have been _able_ to notice, before the morph-swap, except maybe in the vague sense of _this is a Cassie thing, I guess._ But now—

They’d built the Chee because they wanted friends. Not to handle menial or repetitive tasks, not to make manufacturing more efficient, not to solve intractable problems or answer deep questions about the nature of the universe or any of the reasons humans might someday have to invent robots.

They’d done it just for the joy of it. To have someone to talk to, to share with—to bring more total happiness into the universe.

They’d been doomed from the start. But maybe—

—maybe—

—it was better than giving up on what they’d stood for.

“There were only six of them left, by the time we arrived here, and only one of them was conscious. The Pemalites had visited this planet before, in the time before the Chee, and knew that it was good—full of life and promise. The last surviving Pemalite commanded us to stay—to try to find an existence that would satisfy us.”

“And the dogs—”

“They’re reminders,” Tobias said.

I turned just as Garrett lurched forward, seizing him in a tight, awkward hug, his adult body melting away as he returned to his true, eleven-year-old self. Tobias was awake—must have woken up at some point during Erek’s story, because he was alert and upright in the bed they’d made for his recuperation, looking incongruous and strange under the open sky.

“Their programming doesn’t let them interfere with Earth life very much,” he continued, the fingers of his remaining hand dancing in a complex pattern across Garrett’s back. “The Pemalites had run into other intelligent species, so they knew to program the Chee to prevent deliberate violence, but most of the violence in nature isn’t _deliberate,_ it’s _instinctive._ And they can foster growth and flourishing, but they can’t guide or direct it. For a while, they looked after the ancestors of modern wolves and foxes, because those were the animals that looked the most like the Pemalites had. But once humans domesticated dogs—”

“They are our joy,” Erek said solemnly, “because they remind us of a world without evil. The world we lost. Whenever you see a dog playing, chasing a stick, running around barking for the sheer thrill of life, you see an echo of the Pemalite race.”

 _Which is the real reason they give a shit about humans,_ my inner Marco guessed. _Because we’re the only other species that gives a shit about dogs._ I locked eyes with Tobias over Garrett’s still-shrinking form, put forth the theory in thought-speak, got a quick, grim nod in return.

_Note to self—don’t tell Erek you like Chinese food._

I pushed my inappropriate inner Marco aside, turned back to the android. “Why are you telling us all of this?” I asked.

Erek shrugged. “We want you to trust us,” he said. “We know that you’re suspicious. You have to be. And we know all of your secrets. We wanted the situation to be a little more—even.”

“We appreciate it,” I said dryly. “But really all you have to do is give us our stuff back and let us leave.”

Erek nodded. “Fair enough,” he said, and stood. In the distance, a second Chee turned and began jogging toward us, the motion oddly smooth as its head stayed a constant distance from the ground. As it approached, it reached inside of a compartment in its torso, its hologram flickering to life just in time to turn its metal arm into a human hand, awkwardly holding the blue box and an Andalite shredder.

“Thanks,” I said, reaching out and taking both. I turned to Tobias—

Time seemed to slow. Tobias’s face had gone masklike, his eyes bright with tension and everything else frozen in place, his fingers still on Garrett’s back. I felt a wash of sympathetic adrenaline, like a dog reacting to another dog’s whine—felt myself trying to react and clamped down on it— _follow his lead, don’t give anything away—_

I had no idea why he was suddenly on edge, but I wasn’t about to do anything to call attention to it.

‹What’s going on?› I asked privately.

“The kid,” he said tightly, ignoring my question and resuming the sort-of massage he’d been giving Garrett.

“What?”

“The Controller kid. David—”

Right—Erek had said something about that. I looked at Erek, then back at Tobias, who gave a tiny, fractional nod in Erek’s direction.

 _Wh—does he want_ me _to—_

“We’d like to take David with us, too,” I said.

Another fractional nod.

Erek frowned. “The Yeerk inside his head—”

I glanced back at Tobias. “We’ve got oatmeal,” I said, feeling my way forward, watching his face for the slightest reaction, for any subtle hint. “And two other Controllers in our group. We’re not going to starve it or anything.”

Another nod.

There was a pause of maybe half a second, and then Erek nodded, too. “All right,” he said, and in the distance, one of the trees dissolved and vanished, revealing—

I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. “Thanks,” I said again.

With a _hissss_ of compressed gas, the tube lowered to the ground and opened, revealing the frozen body of a twelve-year-old boy. As I watched, a blue light began to scan slowly over him, starting at his feet and rising upward a few inches per second, dissolving away the icy crystals covering his skin and clothes and leaving him normal and alive-looking.

“Controller,” Tobias said, his voice still tight.

“Oh, right,” I acknowledged. “Erek—is he going to be awake?”

“In about five minutes, maybe.”

“Garrett, can you pull him into your morph?” I hadn’t demorphed, myself, both so that I could stay in thought-speak contact with Marco and because _I_ was carrying Ax in wasp morph as a slow-but-secret weapon.

Slowly, reluctantly, Garrett peeled himself off of Tobias and nodded.

“All right, then,” I said, still uncertain. “I guess that’s—that’s it for now?”

 

*        *        *

 

Tobias refused to explain for another forty-five minutes—not until we had gotten out, morphed birds, and were miles away from the safe house, thousands of feet in the air.

‹That should _not have worked,›_ he said finally, speaking only to me, as the six of us flew back toward the forest where we’d left Tom and Mr. Levy.

‹What do you mean?›

‹I mean I tried to get the cube and the shredder back like five different times. I spent _two hours_ trying to talk Erek into it yesterday.›

‹But—›

‹He said their violence protocols wouldn’t let them. That they could _theoretically_ give the stuff to a human, but not to one they’d _seen_ commit violence with them. Not to one that they _knew_ was going to use them for violence in the future.›

If I’d been human, my mouth would have opened and closed half a dozen times before I was able to form words. _But—but—but—_

‹But Erek _saw_ me take out Visser Three, at the high school,› I said.

‹I know,› Tobias answered grimly.

We flew on in silence and confusion.

 

 

 

 


	32. Interlude 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Turns out saving the world is even harder in real life; Visser Three is scary but at least he trims the decision tree. Updates resuming within the next two weeks with Marco, hopefully within the next week/ten days instead. I think it's time for me to admit I can't commit to an every-two-weeks schedule, but I'm going to try. Thanks to the people who sent messages and posted reviews during the hiatus.

 

**Interlude**

The boy squatted next to the tangle of steel wool, his face just inches away from the crawling, glowing worms of fire. Holding the watering can at the ready with one hand, he tilted the red plastic cube in the other and—

—carefully—

—let a teaspoon of golden liquid fall.

The flame that billowed up was bright and yellow, a miniature mushroom cloud, and he jerked backward, falling. It was gone before he even hit the ground, the gasoline having vaporized and the vapor burned away.

The boy smiled.

Moving swiftly, he set aside the watering can and pushed himself to his feet. The pile of S.O.S. pads was still burning, with tongues of orange fire kindling in the sticks and twigs beneath them, but it wouldn’t be long before the crawling embers died. Standing upright, he leaned backward, stretching out his arm, and dropped another splash of fuel.

_Foom._

Another.

_Foom._

A third—larger this time, thicker and more daring, fear and fascination fighting for control as he kept the amber flow going for a full half-second.

_FWOOSH._

He danced backward as the fireball swelled, curling up and up until it dashed itself against the garage ceiling and was reincarnated as a halo of greasy black smoke. Down below, the pile of kindling was now fully ablaze, bright and crackling as the boy let out a laugh and reached forward once more—

“The fuck?”

The boy whirled, his knuckles going white as his fingers tightened in a deathgrip on the can’s handle, don’t drop it, mustn’t drop it—

_“What the fuck are you doing—”_

The boy tried to retreat, tried to run, staggered backward but was stopped after a mere two steps as he collided with the cold metal of his father’s car, his head snapping back against the window with a sickening crack.

_“—trying to burn the goddamn house down?”_

A hand flashed out, and the boy flinched, unable to withdraw any further—

—but it wasn’t an attack, wasn’t a smack or a punch, the hand shot past his face and kept going, wrapped around the handle of the can and _yanked_ —

—he tried, but he couldn’t loosen his fingers fast enough and the can pulled him, dragged him, almost lifted him off his feet and he flailed, paralyzed by his inability to decide which was worse, to stumble into the form of his father or to fall into the fire—

A second hand followed the first, still not a strike but it _hurt_ as it caught his upper arm, moved him without consideration for the softness of his flesh, the palm and fingers wide enough to wrap all the way around, and the boy felt himself spinning as he was dragged away from the little nest of burning scraps—

—a rough release, and he stumbled again, tripping over the watering can as he fell against the workbench hard enough to slide it half an inch—

“Stay.”

The word was like a magic spell, a dark ritual of binding, and the boy froze, the only movement the heaving of his chest and the trembling of his limbs. He didn’t even turn to watch as the shape that was his father strode back into the house—just kept his eyes exactly where they had been pointed, at the slowly spreading puddle of water, his heart beating wildly as though it were trying to break through his ribcage and escape. An endless moment passed, and then the man was back, still carrying the bright red can, and in his other hand—

“What did I _tell_ you about fire, David?”

It was not a question, for all that it ended with a question mark. Silent, frozen, the boy continued to stare as the spreading puddle reached the burning twigs, began to hiss and boil.

“What did your _mother_ tell you?”

Still not a question.

“ _Never,_ David. Never, never, _never_ without supervision.”

David said nothing.

“Look at me.”

His eyes moved so quickly it was as if time had skipped ahead. His father’s face was full and red, with eyes wide and wet, the muscles in his jaw tight and twitching.

“You have to _listen_ to me, David.”

The man stretched out his arm, straight out from his shoulder like a tree branch, higher than David’s head. He held his fist—still closed—directly over the knee-high flames.

“You’re going to learn this lesson _right now.”_

The fingers loosened, and a tiny shard of reddish brown poked out from in between—

“ _No!”_ David shrieked, a sudden rush of panic bursting through the dam of his deeper terror. “ _No, stop, please, no, wait, I’m sorry, don’t—”_

“I told you, David,” the man said, his voice thick and hard behind a subtle slur. “I told you, once, and that’s all you should have needed.”

“ _Nonononononopleaseno—”_

But the fingers opened, and even in his panic, David knew better than to move, knew better than to reach out, there were things one simply Did Not Do, no matter what else happened _that_ line was as clear and bright as the edge of a knife—

Henry the hermit crab fell into the fire.

David screamed—a wordless, feral cry of rage and loss and fear, made all the worse by the fact that _even now_ it wasn’t too late, it _didn’t have to happen_ but his father would not let him move, he _could not move,_ and he could see Henry scrabbling, his tiny legs twitching, David could still _save_ him, there was nothing holding him back except—

Except—

David didn’t know, was too young to have the words for it, could not have expressed what it was that lay between him and the fire, except that he knew it was too terrible to face, too horrifying to imagine, the fear was in him so deep that if it had been him in the fire instead of Henry he still might not have moved.

“Watch,” the voice commanded, as a stream of amber poured out and became death.

David watched.


	33. Chapter 25: Marco

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Don't forget, for every comment and review you leave (either here or over at r/rational), the author spare a helpless innocent. Just a little over seven billion people left to save, in-story, and you can help!
> 
> In all seriousness, though, your comments are what keep me going. Please, if you enjoy this story, take five minutes to share some thoughts. Sincere thanks to all those who've been doing so through thick and thin.

 

“First thing’s first,” I said aloud, and in a quieter tone I broadcast ‹Ready?›

‹Ready,› Rachel answered. Her face was empty, still, giving nothing away.

I raised the Andalite shredder, my palm just the tiniest bit sweaty against the strange, spongy material of the handgrip. Around me, the others stood frozen, feigning shock, my father’s mouth opening as it formed around a question—

“Rachel,” I called out, leveling the weapon. “I’m sorry.”

I fired.

The beam lanced out—a brilliant, blinding purple—and hit her just above her right elbow. There was a moment—a single frame, less than a heartbeat, less than the blink of an eye—when I thought I could see her bones, her skeleton lit up like an X-ray—

And then there was a dull _thud_ as her severed forearm hit the dirt, followed a split second later by the rest of her.

There was a long silence—not shocked, not stunned, not horrified, but simply expectant. It stretched out and out, as the smell of burnt meat and ozone filled the air—

“I guess it’s official, then,” Tobias said. “None of them followed us.”

_Which makes absolutely NO SENSE, if you have over a hundred thousand invisible invincible robots then you DEFINITELY put some of them on surveillance around the only humans on the planet with access to alien technology—_

I let out a breath. “Unless they’re lying about their violence protocols,” I pointed out. “I mean, they _did_ give Rachel a gun.”

In front of me, Rachel had already begun to demorph, her real arm emerging from the stump of her morph armor. She hadn’t made a single sound—not a shout, not a groan, not even a hiss.

 _Elfangor would’ve been proud,_ I felt myself wanting to say.

“There’s definitely _something_ going on that we’re not getting,” I continued, squashing the other line of thought. Reaching out, I handed the shredder to Jake, grip first, and he tucked it into his belt, where it looked way more right and appropriate than it had any business doing.

Looking around at the others, I switched to thought-speak. ‹Not to mention that just because Ax didn’t _find_ any bugs doesn’t mean there _aren’t_ any. So one more time, for the record—make sure you don’t say anything out loud unless you’re cool with them hearing it.›

“Either way,” Jake said, ignoring the thought-speak exactly as he would have if it hadn’t been there. “It’s time to get to work.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Recording,” Tom said, speaking with the voice of Anji, the A/V technician that Tobias’s contact had dug up. He—she, technically—was standing behind a pair of tripods, one of which held up a tiny GoPro while the other supported a large camcorder with half a dozen wires connected to it.

“Streaming,” Garrett said, wearing an identical copy of the same body as he—she?—leaned over a laptop on the dark wooden table. Beside him/her, the real Anji was seated, typing away at a second laptop, her face tight with concentration.

“Give me another minute,” she said, and I nodded.

“Erek?” I asked aloud, speaking into the earpiece we’d stolen three days earlier.

“Standing by,” came the android’s voice. “Ready on your signal.”

“Give it”—I thought for a moment, double checking a rough estimate in my head—“ten minutes, and then go.”

“Roger.”

Switching the earpiece off, I pulled it out of my ear and set it down on the floor next to the prepaid phone it was paired with, and stomped on them both, hard.

“Looks like we’re on,” I said, turning toward the five figures standing together by the faux fireplace. Behind them, through the enormous dining room windows, I could see Rachel stalking around the yard, her tail held rigidly behind her, her eyes darting back and forth like a bird’s. “You all good?” I asked. “Last chance to bail out.”

They nodded as one, identical grim expressions on five very different faces. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“All set now,” Anji called out. “Upload is running, ten second bursts, all timestamped by Google, all obscured. It’s not going to stop anybody from figuring out where we _were_ , but by the time they do we should be long gone. We’re as verified as we’re going to get.”

“Garrett?”

“Posting the link now.”

Closing my eyes, I took in a deep breath, tamping down the butterflies that had started fluttering in my stomach. ‹Jake,› I broadcast privately. ‹We’re starting. Grab Ax and Tobias and clear out.›

‹You got it, buddy. Good luck.›

_Here we go._

I opened my eyes and began morphing out of my armor as I stepped forward, into range of the cameras and the final occupant of the room. He was sweaty and shaking, his eyes wild, soft panic-filled sounds emerging from his throat as his lips moved futilely behind the duct tape covering his mouth.

“Hello, world,” I said, standing as straight as I could. “Welcome to the resistance.”

There were cue cards off to the side, with bullet points, but I didn’t need them. We’d gone over the words at least a dozen times, and they were burned into my memory like a brand.

“My name is Marco Roger Levy, Social Security number five-six-eight-zero-zero-two-two-four-one. My father is Peter Carson Levy, my mother was Elena Louise Roja Levy, died two years ago in a boating accident. We lived at 3555 Franklin Court in Golden Oaks in Ventura. I was a freshman at Belvedere High School, homeroom 4C with Mrs. Ysteboe.”

Garrett held up a sheet of paper with a giant _8_ written on it in Sharpie, and I gave him a tiny nod. “It’s now four-oh-eight PM, central time,” I continued, looking straight into the camera. “This video is streaming to you live, no special effects. Verification—”

I reached out as Tom handed over an iPad, its screen showing ESPN’s live broadcast of the football game. I held it up so the camera could see, then handed it back. “Also, as of this second, Google stock is worth eight hundred sixty-one dollars and forty-seven point two cents, Bitcoin is trading at sixteen hundred forty-three dollars and thirty-eight cents, and Delta Airlines flight 8517 out of Atlanta was just delayed by half an hour and will be taking off at 7:35 instead.”

Bending down, out of sight of the camera, I picked up the shredder and the cast-iron pan. “And _this_ is an alien laser weapon.”

Holding both objects out at arms’ length, I squeezed the trigger and held it, sending a continuous beam of incandescent purple at the center of the pan, which immediately began to glow.

“Ten more seconds, and it’d burn through,” I said, releasing the trigger and turning the pan so the camera could clearly see the circle of bright yellow at its center. Setting the shredder back on the floor, I picked up the laser thermometer and took a reading, turning the screen so it, too, could be recorded. “That’s a little over eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in about three seconds,” I said. “A thousand degrees C.”

Very carefully, I handed the pan to Tom, who stepped through the sliding glass door out onto the deck and dropped it into the Jacuzzi, sending up a billowing cloud of steam.

“This weapon is one of the tools that the Andalite war-prince Elfangor gave us, to fight off the Yeerks,” I said, resisting the urge to wipe a droplet of sweat off my brow. “The other is a piece of Andalite hardware called the Iscafil device, which can give humans the power to shapeshift.”

Holding up my arm, I focused on the osprey, doing my best to localize the changes. I didn’t quite succeed—my head began to change shape as well, and I could feel feathers sprouting all the way down my back—but the results would be obvious even through the camera. After twenty seconds, my hand and forearm were completely gone, replaced by long, elegant bones and silky gray-brown feathers.

“Using this power,” I said, my half-human voice hoarse and rasping as I reversed the partial morph, “we fought back against Esplin, known to us by his rank of Visser Three. We identified a number of captive human Controllers, among them our vice principal Hedrick Chapman, security specialist Aaron Tidwell, accountant Greg Morales, and the aunt and parents of one of our fellow resistance members, Mikayla Certo and veterinarians Michelle and Walter Withers. Those last two are allegedly part of the group that was returned to Earth and is now in U.S. custody.”

They had been dropped off in front of the Capitol building while we were in transit—them and twenty-four other humans, appearing out of thin air as the combination hologram-and-shield that had covered their arrival burned out and self-destructed. So far, none of them had been allowed out of medical quarantine, and no cameras had been allowed in to wherever they were hiding, but a list of names had been released two days earlier and both of them were on it.

“We used the information gathered from our observations to track Yeerk materiel and troop movements, and to infiltrate their stronghold, which was built into the YMCA on Huffman Mill Road. We blew it up, losing one of our own team in the process.”

Off to the side, Garrett held up a sheet of paper reading _58._

“You know what happened next,” I continued, my throat dry. “Esplin—Visser Three—dropped an asteroid on top of Ventura. He claims it was a fail-safe, a dead-man’s switch. However, we have reason to believe it was a deliberate, tactical maneuver, meant to erase the evidence in Ventura and deal with one of the Visser’s political opponents at the same time. We suspect he was planning to resume the invasion in secret elsewhere, with his second batch of Yeerks, until another member of our team took out one of his support fighters over Washington.”

I stepped back and to the side, and Anji turned the cameras to focus on the bound-and-gagged figure lying on the enormous beanbag chair in the middle of the open floor. “Evidence,” I said. “This is David Poznanski, son of Jeremiah Poznanski, a mid-level operative at the Department of Homeland Security. He went missing on the day that a Bug fighter crashed into his house.”

I paused, and turned to look directly into the camera again, dropping my voice a little. “He went missing because the Yeerks kidnapped and infested him, as part of a plan to kidnap and infest his father, to draw information out of the U.S. government. Note that this happened the day _after_ Ventura, and long after Visser Three’s so-called moral revelation—after he claimed to have already ceased all operations on Earth. Note that the Visser didn’t show up to make a public statement until after we’d already exposed the Yeerks’ continuing presence.”

I gestured, and Anji tilted the larger camera, zooming in on David’s face. “David was infested eleven days ago,” I said, “but thanks to the use of a certain kind of Andalite stasis technology, he’s only experienced three days in that amount of time. His Yeerk is about to starve _now,_ and when it does, it’ll fall out of his head, right here in front of you.”

Garrett held up another paper, this time with the number eight hundred and twelve. Reaching down, I peeled off the duct tape covering David’s mouth. He began speaking before it was even halfway off, his voice high and fevered and frantic.

“Please!” he shouted. “Please, the fugue, it’s already— _aaahhhhhhhhrrr_ —it’s started, there’s no time, no _time_ , you have to— _gahhh_ —you’ve got to freeze, to call, the oatmeal, the Visser will come, you _can’t_ just—”

I leaned forward again with the strip of tape.

“No, _please_ , you can’t just— _hhhhnnnnnnngggg_ —you can’t just, just, this is vicious, this is _insane_ —”

I pressed the tape back down, reducing his begging to wordless groans.

“Wide angle,” I said, and Anji zoomed the camera back out. I turned toward the fireplace—toward the five figures standing there in stony silence.

“To verify what’s happening here today, we have five volunteer witnesses, all public figures in good standing. Would you introduce yourselves, please?”

I stepped back, careful not to trip over David’s prone form, making room in the frame for the five adults. They shuffled forward, squeezing together until Anji gave a thumbs-up. Behind her, Garrett raised yet another sheet of paper, this time reading one thousand one hundred and three.

 _Not bad_. Over eleven hundred people watching already, and we were just getting started.

“My name is Sergeant Susan Nickerson,” said the first figure, her eyes dark and focused above her camouflage fatigues. “Human intelligence, stationed at Fort Huachuca.”

She was the primary contact Paul Evans had given Tobias, before they parted ways—a girl he’d gone to school with, who’d kept in touch with him as they both took different paths through the military. All Tobias had was a phone number and a password, but that had been enough—by the time we reached out, Paul had already contacted her, brought her up to speed, and given her command of an eight-person, off-the-books task force, just in case.

“I’m Dr. Richard Scheller,” said the second adult. “I’m a general practitioner, with an office in Stony Creek, North Carolina.”

One of my dad’s old friends, from back when I was little and we’d spent a couple of years in New Jersey. He had more than an office—his practice had branched out into four different locations, and he was a well-connected community member, serving in the Chamber of Commerce and running the local walks to cure breast cancer and juvenile diabetes. He’d been brought in by Tobias and Garrett after their first target, a teacher named Michelle Newsome, had turned out to be too hard for us to find.

“My name is Matthew Joseph Carr, and I’m a pastor at the First Church of Enlightenment in Shallowford, Iowa.”

Our local color, and the one who had contributed the most in terms of detail and recon, given that he was the only one who had ever actually been inside the processing plant where the oatmeal was made.

“And I’m Professor Rebecca Woodmansee, teaching international relations and political analysis at U.C. Berkeley.”

One of Rachel’s dad’s old girlfriends. If we’d still been in hiding, it would have been too risky—too plausible that someone could trace the connection back to Ventura, figure out who we were from the overlap.

But that wasn’t an issue anymore.

“My name is Dr. William Taylor, head of bioinformatics at Helix Inc.”

It had been a toss-up between physics and biology, and William’s home address had been easier to track down than Flora Carrey, who was the head of astrophysics at the nearby university.

It was a big step, bringing in so many new people. We’d spent nearly a full day debating it, even with all of the time pressure pushing us forward. It was a huge uptick in risk—not in terms of direct exposure to Visser Three, but because of the way it complicated the strategic landscape. Each new person was someone who might go off the rails, try to play grownup, try to take over or take the cube. Someone who might get snatched up by the Visser, or by Homeland Security, or by Russia or China. Someone whose plans might end up interfering with our own, who knew almost everything that we did and had almost as many powers, almost as many advantages.

Tobias had started it, with Paul Evans and President Tyagi—and there was Tom, I guess—but it wasn’t hard to argue that those were special cases. Now we’d added fourteen more—regular people, for the most part, twice as many of them as there were of us. We’d vetted all of them with the morphing tech, but only barely—there hadn’t been time for anything more than a quick, five-minute dig through their memories and personalities.

It was Rachel, more than anyone, who’d pushed for it. We didn’t own this war, she’d argued— _couldn’t_ own it, as long as the Yeerks could just pick up and start over where we’d never find them. We needed every recruit we could get, and that meant starting as soon as we could—starting with people who weren’t perfect, weren’t important.

 _I mean, look at_ us, she’d pointed out. _Look at what Elfangor had to work with._

I glanced down at David, whose moans had finally stopped, replaced by rapid, shallow breathing that flared his nostrils. His face had gone gray, and what had been a sheen of sweat was now beading and running down his forehead and cheeks.

“In exchange for the risk that these people are taking by being here today,” I said, stepping back in front of the camera, “we’ve given each of them the same morphing power that was given to us.”

While blindfolded, and with earplugs in, and with six different objects touching them in six different places, one of which vibrated, one of which was extremely cold, and one of which had an electrode that gave a little shock right at the moment of power transfer, after Ax had assured us that it wouldn’t interfere with the process.

I mean, come on—there’s a difference between taking a reasonable risk and just being reckless.

“Try not to be stupid, U.S. government,” I continued. “If you disappear them into some black ops facility to poke and prod at them, you’re just going to make everyone else _more_ paranoid, and don’t forget that the only way to keep the Yeerks from pulling the strings is to keep everything out in the open where _everyone_ can see.”

Not that we were _counting_ on the government doing the sane thing—all five of them knew the risk they were taking, and our plan would work either way. But if there was any chance we could force the issue by shaping the narrative, it was worth a shot. God knows things were crazy enough as it was—six days earlier, the Chinese president had politely and publicly requested that the United States give up the first Bug fighter, the one Tobias had wrecked, so that no single nation had total control of all of the alien technology. The United States government had politely refused, instead offering China a copy of the technical readouts that Visser Three had left, and inviting up to one hundred Chinese scientists to come and study the craft on American soil.

The Chinese had pointed out that this didn’t really address their point, and that in any case the copy of the readouts would be impossible to verify. The Russians had agreed, and had declared their own public support for the “Beijing Compromise.”

The British and the Germans had then declared public support for the United States.

The Japanese and the French had declared themselves neutral, and offered to facilitate negotiations, at which point the Algerian government had pointed out that there were more than two sides when it came to questions like this, and that Africa and India together comprised more than a quarter of the world’s population and should maybe be included in the conversation or at least _acknowledged_.

Then the North Koreans had declared that a refusal to give up at least one of the ships would constitute an act of war.

Then the Australians had declared that nobody cared who North Korea was at war with, and sent a gift of ten thousand cheap plastic boomerangs to the South Korean president with a note saying “Just in case.”

Things had gotten a little complicated after that.

I turned back to the five adults. “Can you please confirm the date and time?” I asked.

They did.

“And is this real?”

The five of them glanced at one another, and Sergeant Nickerson cleared her throat. “As far as I can tell,” she said, stepping forward and looking into the camera, “Marco Levy is an intelligent thirteen-year-old male of Hispanic descent with an accent and background knowledge consistent with a life in southern California. His face appears to match various social media profiles for which he has passwords, and which have archives stretching back for at least three years. I’ve watched him and his colleagues transform into various animals—including other humans—in a way that I cannot imagine being faked except by equivalently impressive technology, and he’s returned to the same form in between each transformation. I’ve also examined and fired the beam weapon he demonstrated earlier, which has kill and stun settings as well as a raw heat laser.”

I felt my shoulders loosening a little. We’d gone over the script of what she would say, but the broadcast was live and we didn’t have the resources to do any kind of delayed censoring. I’d been _pretty_ sure she wasn’t going to throw a wrench into things, but with—I looked over at Garrett’s paper—seven thousand people watching, it would have been a costly mistake.

“We’re currently being held somewhat under duress,” she continued. “Not that we’re _trying_ to leave, but one of them has morphed into what appears to be a dinosaur, and is completely capable of running us down if we make a break for it. I’ve been held incommunicado since first agreeing to direct contact with Marco’s colleagues, and I assume the same is true for the others. At this moment, we’re standing in a large living room with Marco, David, and three others who are running the cameras and computers that are responsible for this broadcast. To the best of my ability to discern, everything here is happening in real time, without the aid of special effects—that looks to be a real kid down there on the beanbag, who reasonably matches the description put out by DCPD, and I’m at least seventy percent convinced that he’s currently possessed by an alien, which I’m at least sixty percent convinced is dying of starvation right now. As for the rest—”

She shrugged, and brought her hand out from behind her back, holding up what was clearly a cloven hoof. Over the course of about thirty seconds, it split and shivered and melted back into a human hand.

“It’s hearsay, but there is some fairly compelling circumstantial evidence.”

I gestured again, and Anji turned the camera, zooming in once more on David’s head. In addition to his quick breathing and the sick, sweaty look on his face, he’d started to tremble, his whole body twitching and squirming on the beanbag.

_Please, let Ax be right about what happens during kandrona starvation._

“This isn’t pretty,” I said, looking down at the boy. “David here is suffering pretty badly right now, and to be honest, we’ve made it worse for him. He’s going to need a good dose of therapy after this. But he’s only been infested for a few days—some of the people in Ventura were enslaved for over two _months._ ”

I reached down and peeled off the tape for a second time. This time, David said nothing, only emitted a strangled, guttural sound like a death rattle.

“Don’t forget,” I said, making my voice as flat and serious as I could. “This was caused by Visser Three _after_ his alleged truce. That’s what really matters, here.”

We watched in silence as David’s twitching slowed, his eyes unfocusing as if he was drifting off into unconsciousness. Then he convulsed—sharply—once, twice, three times, his heels smacking painfully against the wooden floor. He sat halfway up, his eyes rolling back into his head, and then he collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.

Two seconds.

Five seconds.

Ten seconds.

_Come on—_

The absolute _last_ thing we needed was to kill a kid on camera and not even have a Yeerk to show for it. I glanced over toward Garrett, who was now holding up two papers, the first reading _32000+_ and the second reading _Fox News._

Someone gasped.

Staying clear of the camera’s line of sight, I crouched, peering closely at David’s ear.

_Yes._

There it was—just emerging, stretching and waving like the stalks of a snail as it crawled out of the kid’s head, searching desperately for its pool. It grew and stretched and grew and stretched, grotesquely large, unnervingly long—at least six inches, end-to-end, and more than an inch thick at its middle. It crawled out of his ear, fell onto the beanbag, twitched twice, and was still.

Fighting back the urge to retch, I reached down and picked it up. It was wet, streaked with blood and brain-juice and its own slime, and it deformed under its own weight, threatening to slip through the gaps between my fingers like melted cheese. Stepping toward the camera, I held it up, and Anji fiddled with the lens, getting the clearest possible picture.

“Now you’ve seen it,” I said softly. “This is what they look like, when they die—and that’s what _we_ look like, when it happens. Three days is what it takes, to starve them out.”

I looked toward Garrett again. _100000 and counting_.

“That is, unless they’ve been eating Ralph’s brand maple and ginger instant oatmeal.”

I paused while Anji refocused the camera, giving the audience time for the initial _what the fuck_ shock of what I’d just said to pass. Beneath me, David hiccupped, coughed, and started to come awake; without a word, Matthew and Rebecca reached out and drew him off to the side, where they started to untie him.

“When Yeerks leave their hosts and go back into the pool,” I continued, “they share memories and pick up a bunch of nutrients, but the most important nutrient is one called _kandrona._ I don’t know what it is, and probably neither do they, because they only got their hands on post-Stone-age technology a couple of years ago. But apparently there’s a molecule in Ralph’s oatmeal that does something similar.”

I grimaced. “Earth’s unusually bio-diverse, it turns out. Not sure why, but it’s true—according to the Andalites, both the Andalite homeworld and the Yeerk homeworld have only around five thousand or so different species. So when they got here— _especially_ after they’d infested a few biologists and geneticists—they started poking around to see if there maybe was a kandrona substitute just lying around, ready to use. And it turns out that if an infested human eats Ralph’s oatmeal—specifically the instant maple and ginger kind—then the Yeerks can survive without ever having to come out and feed.”

I held up the box for the camera. “That’s the bad news,” I said. “ _Good_ news is, you can just destroy every box of this crap you can find, and if someone starts acting weird about that—well, they’re not _necessarily_ a Controller, don’t go starting a witch hunt just because somebody’s got some healthy skepticism, but it’s at least worth looking into. Especially if they just started eating it in the last month or so, and if they eat more than one packet per day.”

I let the box fall to the floor. If everything was going according to plan—

— _ha—_

—then right now, Erek and a few thousand other Chee were currently visiting every single Ralph’s in existence, buying up and destroying the entire market supply of the oatmeal. That wouldn’t do a whole lot if Visser Three had been secretly, _privately_ stockpiling—

— _which he_ was _, because duh—_

—but it was a start. And Jake, Tobias, and Ax should already be at the factory along with the rest of Sergeant Nickerson’s team, which would be a whole lot _more_ of a start.

But first—

“As far as we know, Visser Three has enough Yeerks left to set up a single, self-sustaining pool—they need critical mass to get an infestation going. So he’s either done that already, with a second invasion point somewhere on the surface, or he’s holding back. If he’s holding back, then his major tools are bombardment from space, political manipulation, and agents-provocateur using oatmeal or taking regular trips back to orbit to feed. Those are the weapons we have to defend against—that’s the situation for the next four and a half months, at which point he gets a twenty-ex infusion of materiel and a fifty-ex personnel reinforcement.”

Following a sudden impulse, I leaned forward, grabbing the sides of the camera and putting my face right in the lens. ‹Now,› I whispered in thought-speak before continuing aloud.

“That means about a hundred and fifty starfighters, about twelve motherships, and maybe twenty or thirty million space slugs. Enough to take out every military base, every aircraft carrier, every fighter jet on Earth. Enough to wipe out every major city. They’ve got weapons like we can’t imagine, they’ve got the high ground, and everybody we lose ends up on their side. But still—”

I leaned even closer, put my head right against the cowl around the lens, stared straight into the cold, black eye of the camera. “They don’t _want_ to blow us all to hell. They want our infrastructure intact—our farms, our factories, our manufacturing capability. According to the Andalite warrior on our team, they’re fighting ground wars on at least twenty different planets, in situations where a bunch of F-35s would actually make a serious difference. There’s only so much damage they can do to us before they’re not even getting their money’s worth in trying to take us over.”

I took a step back. “We outnumber them two hundred to one. And they just got off their rock _two years ago._ We can beat them, as long as we actually _try._ As long as we don’t just shrug and go back to everyday jobs, everyday life, just act like this isn’t happening.”

I gestured over to the corner where David was sitting, shivering, with a blanket around his shoulders, a line of blood running down his cheek, and a dead, empty look on his face.

“This is your call to action, people,” I said. “Remember Ventura. Remember Cortéz and Hitler and the Trojan Horse and all the other times when it really would’ve been a good idea to be less polite and more suspicious. Trust _each other_ —odds are, none of your family or friends are Controlled, and even if they are you can make your decisions out in the open, by consensus, while you wait for three days to go by. But don’t fool yourself that the bad part’s already over.”

I sucked in a breath, my eyes flickering over toward Garrett, whose paper now read _½mil._ “We don’t know where the Yeerks will land next, assuming they haven’t already. We don’t know what they’ll come at us with, when this inevitably goes south. Big cities and big armies are just big targets—the human race _as a whole_ needs to be prepared, provisioned, and armed, in a distributed, decentralized way. We need a whole bunch of superteams, two or five or ten or twenty people who trust each other, who can work together and get shit done without supervision and without direction. Engineers. Soldiers. Scientists. All you survival nuts and right-wing militia types and backyard inventors, step up—this is your moment. Figure out how to detect a Yeerk in somebody’s head, and how to get it out without waiting three days. Figure out how to mimic their tech, and how to make _better_ tech. Maybe start with earplugs, or with whatever the opposite of Ralph’s oatmeal is. And if you’re a government agent with access to whatever info Visser Three gave us along with those ships, leak it _now_. Get it out onto the internet where seven billion people can look at it, not in some dark lab where a couple of well-placed Yeerks can pull the strings.”

Taking another step back, I squared my shoulders. This was the part we’d worked out after Tobias had come back—after he’d filled us in on what he’d done with Tyagi and Evans, after we’d recovered the cube, after we’d given up hope of figuring out what Visser Three was up to in time to stop it.

 _He_ wants _us to start building Yeerk tech,_ Tobias had said. _That plays right into his hands, if we build the factories and then he gets to swoop in and take them over._

 _Yeah,_ Rachel had countered, _but he’s going to get them either way if he wins. This way, we have a chance to use them ourselves, first._

It was a dangerous line of reasoning. But at the same time—

The U.S. government was holding on to two starfighters, complete with cloaking devices and repulsorlifts and phasers and hyperdrives. Not to mention that we had the _Iscafil_ device and were willing to use it, and that two of the people in our group were voluntary Controllers, and that there was a Yeerk fleet just four and a half months away, and at some point the Andalites might show up, too, and whatever it was that we’d seen in the Yeerk pool, we didn’t have any better word for it than “god”—

“There’s no going back,” I said bluntly. “Not anymore. It’s never going to be like it was before Ventura.”

It had been the last, lingering hesitation, the last little bit of resistance in our way—the idea that our job was to get everything back to _normal,_ that the end goal was life as it had been two months ago.

“One way or another, change is coming. Space flight. Morphing tech. Instantaneous communication. It might take a month, it might take a year, it might take a decade, but win or lose, humanity is in the future now. The old Earth is over.”

I nodded to the side, and Anji swiveled the camera to where the five of them—

— _no, wait, four._ Professor Woodmansee had stayed off to the side, with David.

—were halfway through their morphs, a mad mix of human and tiger, human and python, human and eagle, human and Hork-Bajir.

“So keep this in mind, as you fight—none of us knows what victory is going to look like. Maybe we beat the Yeerks back. Maybe we hide from them. Or maybe this ends with a peace treaty and a federation. Maybe we do it alone, or maybe the Andalites show up to help, or maybe they end up being our enemies, too.”

I felt a lump forming in my throat and swallowed hard, forcing it away. “The only thing that matters,” I said carefully, shaping the words one at a time, “is that we end up in a future where we get to decide for ourselves. Where humanity’s fate is in humanity’s hands. This isn’t a war about life and death. The Yeerks don’t _want_ us dead. But it’ll _become_ that, if we go down that road. If we try to fight a war of extinction, we’re going to lose it. The only way out of this war is to make peace and cooperation look better than genocide.”

I clenched my jaw shut. _He might be right, you know,_ Jake had said. Softly, quietly—at night, where none of the others could hear. _Visser Three, I mean. What Tobias said, about there being higher forces at work, and us not having to play along with stupid roles. I mean, look at Ax and Temrash. If it means no more Venturas—maybe that_ is _the way we end this._

I hadn’t said anything. Half of me had wanted to scream at him, to scream and yell about everything Temrash had done to Tom, we’d been inside Tom’s mind, he’d _seen_ it, that was his own brother and he was willing to consider compromising with _that,_ even for a split second—

But the other half of me kept throwing up words like _pearl clutching_ and _moral grandstanding_ , kept pointing out that the total badness of ten thousand human slaves in Ventura didn’t hold a candle to the total badness of half a _million_ dead bodies after the asteroid strike. Kept remembering the _next_ night after the mesa, when I couldn’t sleep, when I’d gotten up and acquired my dad—carefully, without waking him—and gone back through all of _his_ memories of the past few months.

I wasn’t sure which hurt worse—the bad parts, or the _good_ ones.

“So don’t start thinking that the way out of this is to kill them all,” I said, my voice still tight. “This isn’t about justice or vengeance, it’s about survival. It’s about freedom, and sovereignty, and choice—about still being alive to _make_ choices. That’s the only thing that matters, and _any_ solution that gets us there is on the table. _Has_ to be on the table. We can’t rule out things we _shouldn’t have to do._ We’re the Indians, here, not the conquistadores.”

I looked back at the four morphs behind me, the tiger and the python and the eagle and the Hork-Bajir all looking bizarre against the elegant fireplace. David and Professor Woodmansee were still huddled together to one side, David’s face still sickly and gray.

 _Would the_ Iscafil _device even_ work _on a Yeerk?_ I’d asked.

Ax hadn’t known. But his best guess was no, since there was no single locus of control for the tech to latch onto, to respond directly to.

And as long as Visser Three was in charge, there was no way to tell a genuine compromise apart from a clever trap.

I looked at the cue cards, at the points we’d laid out for ending the broadcast. They’d seemed okay before, but now that I was here, in the moment, they felt hollow.

_So say something else._

“In the meantime, though, we’re fighting. With you, for you, and for as long as we have to. Animorphs, out.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Look at his face. He’s in shock. I get that you did what you had to do, but _now,_ we need to get this _innocent child_ to a hospital.”

“Look, it’s not _safe,_ okay? We just plastered his face all over the internet. We take him to a hospital, he’s going to get snatched up—by the spooks, if he’s lucky, and by Visser Three if he’s not.”

“So what are you going to do, just _keep_ him? That’s—”

“We’re not kidnapping him, _obviously._ His dad works in Homeland Security, and can keep him safe. We’re taking him straight back to D.C. as soon as the mission’s—”

_“No!”_

We all jerked at the sudden shriek as David began to struggle weakly against Professor Woodmansee’s embrace. His eyes were still fuzzy and unfocused, but they pointed straight at me as he pleaded, his tone eerily identical to the way it had sounded as his Yeerk was dying. “No, please, don’t, let me stay _here,_ I can _help_ , don’t send me back—”

“David— _David_ , hold still, I’m not going to hurt you—”

“He’s awful, I was going to run away _anyway_ , please—”

‹Marco—›

“—I’ll do whatever you tell me to—”

‹—what do you think—›

“—I don’t need a hospital, I’m okay, I’m fine—”

‹—we should do?›

I gritted my teeth. We didn’t have _time_ for this, Jake and the others had already relayed their status and the clock was ticking—

“—don’t have the legal right to make this decision—”

“—please—”

“—still bleeding—”

‹Marco?›

“Enough,” I snapped, even though it had zero effect on the babble that was pouring into my ears and mind. Reaching for the shredder, I spun the dial to stun and fired a single, brief pulse of energy.

There was a shocked, angry silence.

“No time, not a democracy,” I said, lifting a finger as Professor Woodmansee opened her mouth in outrage. “You _agreed_ to that, going in.”

It probably wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t been holding a laser gun in my other hand, but—

Well. I _was_ holding a laser gun.

I shifted my gaze. “Garrett.”

“Yeah?”

“Can you take him into your morph, keep him out of harm’s way?”

“Yeah.”

“All right, then. Garrett takes David, Tom takes the camera and the laptop, the rest of you clear out and head to your pickup points. Anji, let Jake’s team know I’m on the way.”

I turned toward the second tripod and grabbed the GoPro off the top, dropping it and the shredder into the backpack I’d stolen earlier in the week. Sending a quick burst of thought to Rachel out in the yard, I continued. “Everyone needs to be out of here in six minutes or less, unless you’ve got a morph that’s fireproof.”

“What—”

“We’re burning the house,” I said. “No idea what kind of fuckery Visser Three might do if he got access to whatever DNA we’ve left in here, plus it’s just a good principle in general.”

“But—”

“I told you we weren’t going to tell you everything. In or out, your call, but if you’re in, this is how it goes. We’re fighting a war, and you’re not the grownup anymore.”

Shouldering the backpack, I gave twin nods to Tom and Sergeant Nickerson, stepped through the sliding glass door, and took off across the grass.

‹That sounded fun.›

‹You were _listening?›_

‹The whole time—this thing has really good hearing. You’re not exactly a Jake when it comes to dealing with people, huh?›

‹I’m not exactly a Rachel, either.›

‹Touché. Look, given how that went, you want me to follow Woodmansee? Or any of the others?›

I thought for a moment as I reached the edge of the yard and tossed my bag over the fence, wincing at the crunching sound it made on the other side. ‹No,› I said, gripping the thin wooden slats and hauling myself up and over. ‹They’ll either go to their pickup points, or they won’t. Either way, they’re not our problem anymore.›

‹Didn’t peg you for a one-night stand kind of guy.›

‹To be fair, Woodmansee was never really my type. I’m more into beach babes and math nerds.› I landed on the already-damaged plants of the neighbor’s garden and picked up the backpack. ‹Stick to the plan. Torch the house, then the four of you head to the rendezvous. We’ll see you in an hour.›

‹Good luck, Marco.›

‹Thanks. With any luck, we won’t need it.›

 

*        *        *

 

‹Is that you, Marco?›

‹Yeah. Ax? Where are you?›

‹We are in one of the trees. Prince Jake assigned us to keep watch.›

I settled onto the rooftop, fighting the urge to shiver. Andalites didn’t think and speak in words, which meant that the _we/us_ pronoun thing wasn’t a deliberate choice so much as it was the translation tech accurately reflecting Ax’s true meaning. Which might have meant that he was just saying _the two of us together are in the trees,_ or it might have meant something a lot creepier.

‹What’s the situation?› I asked, keeping the line of communication private.

‹Everything is going smoothly. Agent Dill’s impersonation of the floor manager went unnoticed, and he was able to authorize the drug search without raising suspicions. Prince Jake and Tobias detected two Controllers, and identified them to the rest of the team. They have withdrawn, and I believe—›

A high, piercing alarm began to sound, and small lights on each of the corners of the roof began to strobe.

‹—yes, that is the alarm.›

I fluttered over to the edge of the roof and looked down over the loading dock. A stream of blue-uniformed workers had already appeared, each of them running at something close to a sprint as they headed out toward a green-painted section of the parking lot. There was an identical safe zone in the parking lot at the front of the building, too, which would be filling up just as fast—we’d looked it up, and fires at a factory that milled flour were no joke.

‹Thermite’s set, then?›

‹I believe so.›

One part aluminum powder, three parts rust, with a strip of magnesium to make sure the initial fire was hot enough—it would burn through wood, plastic, and metal, and enough little piles of it would completely wreck the critical parts of every piece of machinery inside the processing plant before the regular fire took care of the rest.

And you could buy the ingredients on Ebay. Sergeant Nickerson’s squad had actual explosives, but we were saving those for the moment when we _really_ needed them.

‹We did check to make sure there wasn’t a _real_ fire risk, before—›

‹Yes, Marco. Agent Dill closed down all processes an hour ago, and the ventilation systems have been running at full power since then.›

‹Okay.›

They’d be setting off the thermite some time within the next minute, after which I’d have at least another five minutes before the fire became large enough to threaten the roof. Tilting my head, I scanned the sky, using the osprey’s water-piercing vision to search for the telltale shimmer of an approaching cloaked ship.

Nothing.

Yet.

_Would you just relax?_

I couldn’t take a particularly deep breath with the osprey’s lungs, so I simply ruffled my feathers and claw-hobbled over to the other side of the roof, trying to shake the urge to check in with Jake directly.

_He’s got this. Stop backseat strategizing._

It wasn’t any different from the pool, really—when we’d sent in Garrett and Rachel and Ax and then just sat around waiting.

_Except that this time it’s Jake. And this time, there’s no force field, you’re close enough that you could actually DO something—_

No.

This was Jake’s half of the show. There was a difference between protectiveness and _over_ protectiveness.

Reaching the edge, I peered over into the main parking lot. There were another twenty or thirty employees clustered in the green safe zone, most of them blue collar with a small scattering of suits. Two of them—one suit, one worker—were on their knees in handcuffs, as members of Sergeant Nickerson’s squad stood over them, dressed as DEA agents. The rest looked horrified as they split their attention between their colleagues and the smoke that had started to billow from the building’s vents.

Well, _almost_ all the rest—three of them had their phones out, filming as Jake’s human form finished emerging from the furry shape of a German Shepherd, his lips already moving. Even in the osprey body, I felt myself tense—if one of the Controllers had some kind of hidden weapon, or if the Yeerks chose this moment to show up—he was out in the open, without the protection of morph armor—

 _You know, you didn’t freak out this much_ before _the mesa._

Shoving both threads of thought to the side, I took to the air, flying straight across until I was circling above them, close enough to hear.

“—necessary. I know that doesn’t make it any _better,_ but—”

He paused, and scrubbed at his hair.

“But that’s the way it is. For what it’s worth, we’re willing to offer you the morphing power as a consolation prize, but that comes with its own problems—you’d have to choose between letting the government grab you or going on the run with both them and the Yeerks after you. I wouldn’t recommend it for anybody with other options, especially not if you’ve got family out there.”

There was a sharp _crack_ from the building behind him, and he broke off again, turning. I followed suit, banking just in time to see the glass from one of the giant windows near the roof fall and shatter against the pavement, tendrils of flame licking out of the gaping hole and darkening the wall.

“In the meantime, these agents are going to take these two into Washington, with the rest of the survivors that V—that Esplin dropped off last week. They’ll be held until the Yeerks are starved out of their heads and they’re free humans again.”

Jake reached out to touch their shoulders, his fingers just high enough to brush the skin of their necks—a casual-seeming gesture, but with the osprey’s sight I could see the lethargy of the acquiring trance come over both of their faces.

“How do we know _you’re_ not Yeerks?” came a quavering voice from the crowd.

Jake smiled—a small, sad smile. “If we were, you wouldn’t be asking that question,” he said.

Then he nodded to the agents, who formed up around him—all but one, who stayed to guard the two Controllers—and together they turned and began walking away from the building. A handful of people seemed to waver with indecision, and then two started after them, stopping in their tracks as I broadcast:

‹Wouldn’t do that if I were you. You do that, and you’re our newest recruit.›

The pair looked at each other for a long, long moment, and then split, one running forward, the other falling back.

‹Jake,› I began, but he was already turning, warned by Ax or Tobias or his own sixth sense. He raised a hand, made a casual _come on_ gesture, and continued walking.

In the distance, sirens approached.

 

*        *        *

 

‹That went well.›

‹Yeah. Maybe _too_ well? Like, suspiciously well?›

‹The whole thing took less than an hour. Visser Three can’t be _everywhere._ And besides, even if he _can_ , as long as he’s committed to this whole new leaf charade….›

‹Yeah. I guess so.›

‹There were just two of them, then?›

‹Probably more, once you account for the fact that there are multiple shifts. But we’ll let Nickerson know who the others were as soon as we get to the rendezvous point, and she’ll put the APB out.›

‹We going to keep her with us?›

‹I don’t know. They definitely helped us out _this_ time. Can you imagine trying to cobble together the broadcast ourselves, with stolen equipment? Not to mention that a team of four would’ve had a pretty hard time pulling off the factory part.›

‹True.›

‹But I still get this itchy, creepy feeling, you know? Like, not because of _her_. Just a sense that we should stay as far off the grid as we can, at least for now.›

‹Yeah. That, and stay small. Tight-knit.›

‹What, that’s it? No objections? No making me explain myself?›

‹Nope.›

‹Who are you, and what have you done with Marco?›

‹I just figured I’d quit making you prove what you’ve already proved, I guess.›

‹Oh. …Thanks.›

‹No problem, Fearless Leader.›

 

 

*        *        *

 

“China,” Jake said, dropping heavily to the mulch floor.

“That’s it?” I asked.

He nodded grimly. “It started about six weeks ago, and unfortunately, that’s as much as these two know. There’s a third guy, Benjamin Dufreyne—Nickerson’s already left to track him down. I sent Rachel with her, and Tobias is following on the DL. If he hasn’t already spooked, they’ll get him.”

“Dufreyne knows where the oatmeal was being shipped?”

“Yeah. Exact address and everything.”

I grimaced. “There won’t be anything left by the time we get there.”

Jake nodded again, his eyes tracing around the ad-hoc campsite. We’d gotten pretty good at making them over the past month—there was a fire crackling merrily in a clean, round pit, and a handful of lean-tos up against a nearby hillside. Just outside one of them, Tom was locked in conversation with the worker who’d followed us, both of their expressions dark and serious. The remaining half of Sergeant Nickerson’s squad was circled up outside another, playing cards with my dad as they sat on their packs.

“How about this?” Jake gestured down at the body lying between me and Garrett.

“Nothing yet,” I said.

“We were deciding whether to talk to him first, or just check him out via morph,” Garrett added. He had curled up next to Ax as soon as he’d finished releasing David from morph-stasis, and the pair of them were watching Jake with all six eyes.

“What’s the deal?” Jake asked.

“Went berserk a little bit after the Yeerk died out of his head,” I said. “Started shouting that he didn’t want to go back to his dad, that he wanted to stay and help us. I kind of got the sense that there was maybe some abuse or something?”

Jake sighed. “You stunned him before stashing him away?”

“Yeah. He should wake up any minute.”

“Let’s talk to him, then. We can still do a morph check, after. You already acquire him?”

I nodded.

“All right.”

We sat in silence for several minutes, each of us thinking our own thoughts.

_China._

It was—

—a big place, was all my brain would provide. An address would definitely help narrow things down, but there was no way Visser Three would fail to close _that_ loophole. After the factory, his operational security would be completely airtight.

Which just brought us right back around to the question of what we would do _next._ We’d given the world two separate examples of currently-active Controllers operating on Earth, and left at least four morphers for the government to find, protect, and—hopefully—publicize.

_Maybe we should just sit back and see what happens._

But even as I thought it, I knew it was wrong. There _was_ something we could do to be proactive—something other than just throwing the _Iscafil_ device around. There _had_ to be. Maybe we could get Paul Evans to reconnect us with Tyagi, or spend some more time figuring out the Chee—

David jerked up into a sitting position.

“Whoa!” Jake called out, holding up his hands in a calming, conciliatory gesture. “Hang on, hang on, hang on.”

Twenty paces away, the four Marines—or whatever they were—had snapped into readiness, leaping to their feet and fanning out in a wide arc, covering half of the space that David might have chosen to escape through. Beside me, Garrett and Ax remained very, very still, and I wondered whether Garrett had put on his morph armor and had access to his psionic weapon.

Slowly, as if trying not to startle _us,_ David rose to his feet, his eyes wide and hunted, his skin still looking clammy and cold. “What—where—”

His gaze landed on me, and for a split second, I thought I saw his expression tighten—eyes narrowing, lip curling—but it was gone by the time I looked closer, and could easily have been my imagination.

“My name is Jake, David. Jake Berenson.”

David said nothing, his slender fingers twitching and flexing as if he were fighting the urge to clench them into fists.

“Do you—I mean, were you—awake? While you were—”

“Yeah. I know who you are.”

“Okay. Good.” Moving slowly, smoothly, Jake eased into a cross-legged position, his hands in his lap, his back upright. “First off, I’m sorry.”

David said nothing for a long moment, his eyes tracing as far as they could as he checked over each shoulder. The soldiers kept their distance, their hands off their weapons.

“For what?” David asked evenly, as he brought his eyes back around to Jake, this time passing over me as if I weren’t even there.

“Stunning you. Keeping you prisoner. For taking you away from your house in the first place, too—we didn’t want you to get snatched up by the other Yeerks.”

David was silent.

“Marco says you don’t want to go back.”

More silence.

“Is that true?”

A nod.

“Why?”

A pause as David looked around again, and then—

“He hits me.”

Jake and I exchanged glances.

“Your dad?” Jake asked.

Another nod.

“Okay. Is that really enough reason to—”

“He hits me _hard._ ”

Jake fell silent, and the moment stretched out. I could see David relaxing, inch by inch—his breathing slowing, the tension leaking out of his shoulders, his face. By the time he spoke again, he looked almost calm, his voice level and controlled.

“You’re fighting aliens. Right?”

Jake nodded.

“Those—people—who snatched me. The dinosaur guys, and the thing they put inside my head—Daskan. That’s who you’re fighting.”

“Yes.”

“And you—you can change into animals. You’re aliens, too?”

Jake shook his head. “No. Just regular people with some alien technology.”

David turned his head pointedly—

“Well, yeah. He’s an alien. His name is Ax. My name is—”

“Jake. You said. And the others. Tobias—he’s the one missing a hand? The one who got me out after the spaceship crashed? And—and Marco, and Tom, and Garrett, and Rachel. Marco’s dad. And these new guys.”

“You’ve been paying attention.”

“Something about an asteroid.”

“The bad guy—Visser Three. Right before you got taken—”

“Ventura. That was him? That was aliens?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’d they snatch _me_?”

I felt something tugging at my attention, a note of dissonance. Something was off—

“They wanted your dad. They were going to use you to get to him.”

“Why’d they want _him?”_

“Because they’d figured out he’d been meeting with us.”

And then it clicked, as I watched David’s face remain absolutely unmoved—as he showed no reaction at all to the things Jake was saying.

He was hiding _._ Faking. Lying, maybe—if the Yeerk in his head had told him its name, then it was unlikely it hadn’t told him _anything_ else. But either way, he was trying not to let us see what he knew, what he was really thinking and feeling—

 _Well, no shit. What would_ you _be doing, in his shoes?_

“Because he’s helping you,” David said flatly. “Helping you fight.”

“Yeah.”

“And now he knows I’m alive.”

“Probably, yeah.”

“Are you going to send me back?”

“Probably.”

“Why?”

Another long silence. Jake tilted his head, looking up at the boy, his own face open and sympathetic. “Because you’re a kid?” he said gently.

“ _He’s_ a kid,” David said, gesturing at Garrett. “He’s littler than me.”

“He doesn’t have a family.”

“ _I_ don’t have a family. Just an abusive asshole dad.”

Another note of dissonance. I shot a sidelong glance at Jake, trying to see if he was picking up on it, too.

 _What are you talking about, of_ course _he’s picking up on it, if_ you _noticed it—_

I said nothing.

“Let’s say we didn’t send you back, then,” Jake said carefully. “What would you do?”

“Stay here and help.”

“And if we didn’t let you do that?”

“Let me go. I can take care of myself.”

“They’ll be looking for you. The government and the Yeerks both. They all know what you look like, now.”

_Thanks to us._

I watched the kid’s face—like calm water—as he looked at Jake, at me, at Garrett and Ax. Thinking. Weighing. Making a careful decision—

“Not if you gave me that shapeshifting ability.”

“Who says we even can?” Jake hedged.

“I’ve been paying attention.”

‹Marco, can you answer back?›

I waited until David’s eyes were elsewhere, then shook my head fractionally no.

‹Okay, just listen,› Jake said, thinking in short fragments as he continued arguing with David aloud. ‹I think we could maybe—use this kid—I’m getting a sort of—Tobias-type vibe off him—like he can take care—of himself.›

“—gave it to that professor woman—”

“—she was helping us—”

“— _I_ could help you—”

‹Not confident—talking like—five percent chance. But there’s definitely—something going on—under the surface there—and I can’t tell if it’s—because—abuse—or what. I want to watch—how he reacts—to you going through—his mind, okay? So get ready—to morph—›

“—deserve _something,_ all of this stuff is _your fault_ , you guys can’t just send me back to my dad and act like—”

“We can, actually,” Jake said, an edge of steel entering his tone as he interrupted the smaller boy. “We’re fighting a war, here, as you’ve clearly noticed, and as much as we might owe you, we’ve got a _lot_ bigger fish to fry. You want to talk about joining up, that’s the _first_ thing you’ll have to get straight, is that _fair_ doesn’t really come into it.”

David nodded—his face still just that tiniest bit too calm, with not even a flicker of anger or annoyance at being cut off, bossed around.

_Maybe his dad bosses him around, too. Maybe his dad doesn’t like backtalk._

“Marco,” Jake said, his eyes still locked on David’s.

I stood up.

“There’s this thing about morphing tech,” Jake continued. “We know how to use it to look inside somebody’s head. To see their thoughts and memories and personality. To find out whether they’re telling the truth or not.”

I could feel myself shrinking just the tiniest bit, the sensation like falling in slow motion as my clothes grew baggy and loose, as my skin lightened from copper to khaki.

“So Marco’s going to take a quick look inside your head, see what you’re like from the inside, find out if you’re telling the truth or not.”

“And if I am?”

“If you are, then maybe this conversation keeps going, and we give you a chance to explain why you’d be worth the hassle of telling your dad we somehow lost his kid. Who knows—maybe you _can_ help us. But if not….”

Jake trailed off, his eyes intent on David’s face.

David didn’t flinch. Just nodded, and crossed his arms, and watched, as my hair grew out and softened and my arms and legs thickened. Another minute passed, and we were eye to eye, identical in height as we were in everything else.

‹Here goes,› I whispered to Jake, and I reached inside for the tiny mental lever—

_Click._

It was like I had dropped into the Arctic ocean, or been teleported into outer space.

Cold.

Sharp.

Stark.

Vast.

David’s mind was like an empty prison cell, a spiderweb made out of razor blades. There was no sensation of color—no subtlety or chaos—no feeling or sentiment of any kind. Just a freezing, keen clarity, the workings of an emotionless machine.

Wordless, I opened up his memories—

His initial, feral surge against the Yeerk Daskan, a wave of unhinged fury that scoured the inside of his mind with fire and rage, and the immediate, almost total capitulation when he saw that it hadn’t worked—

The burning humiliation as Mrs. Hanes called him up to the front of the room, she _knew_ he hadn’t read the chapter, she _knew_ it and she was doing this _just to hurt him—_

The bottomless fury as his mother left, she _left him with his father_ , and even as she left she knew that he would blame David, knew that she was making it worse and she did it anyway, and the results were exactly as expected, like clockwork—

A dozen, a hundred, maybe a _thousand_ instances, an unending madhouse reflection of the same moment over and over again, no matter what David did, there was no way out, no way out, the pain was coming and there was _nothing you could do to avoid it—_

I saw the forging of a fury so white-hot it was practically a laser, able to come and go in an instant.

I saw the fear that was both the hammer and the anvil—not so much his father’s abuse but the helplessness _surrounding_ it, the gibbering, unbearable sensation of being trapped, cornered, of wanting to claw at the walls until your fingernails bled but knowing there was no point.

And I saw, strung between those twin poles of rage and terror, in the emptiness where a human soul should have been, a single, pure, and crystalline insight—that there was no justice, no balance, no morality to protect and no protector to rely on. That there was nothing to pursue except his own satisfaction, and no boundary to that pursuit except his sense of self-preservation.

‹Jake,› I began, trying to keep the horror out of my—

— _fleeting disorientation—_

‹What’s the word, Marco?›

I began to demorph, feeling relaxed, confident—almost _hopeful._ ‹We definitely want this kid,› I said. ‹Forget being another Tobias—I think he might be another _you._ ›

‹Oh?›

‹Yeah,› I said, closing down the mental copy of the kid so he wouldn’t suffer. ‹Very solid. Perceptive, helpful, loyal, looks out for the little guy. Leader type.›

‹His dad?›

‹Not gonna be happy, but I vote it’s a price worth paying.›

Jake turned back toward David, gave him a slow, respectful nod. “Marco says good things,” he said. “Let’s keep talking.”

The boy nodded back, his expression unchanged, a picture of calm, cool confidence.

 

 

 

 


	34. Interlude 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter will be posted within ten minutes.

**Interlude 9**

“So, here’s what you need to understand. At some point, one of you is going to get captured by the Yeerks. It’s inevitable, just a matter of time. And when that happens, they’re going to know _everything._ Everything you’ve seen, everything we’ve told you, they’re going to replay this conversation right here a thousand times until they’ve squeezed out every little detail they can, whether you thought it was important or not. And then they’re going to come for us, and they’re going to kill us, because _us_ they can’t infest. So until somebody else invents Yeerk-proof earplugs, every last one of you is a liability. You’re a ticking time bomb. You’re the noose around our throat.”

“But then why—”

“Because you stepped up. You volunteered. Humanity still needs you—it’s just that _we_ don’t. We’re not stopping you from fighting, we just can’t let you fight with _us.”_

“But how—”

“Look, I’m fourteen, okay? You’ll figure it out, trust me. Acquire as many animals and people as you can, stay in morph as often as possible, and try to keep your head down. And when the time comes—do what needs to be done.”

“So you’re just _ditching_ me? I can’t—I mean, there’s _no_ way that I can—”

“None. Sorry. Better go ahead and swallow that now.”

“But then what’s—what are you going to—”

“I’m going to put this blindfold on you, and then we’re going to drop you off somewhere nice and quiet and safe. You’re going to count to a thousand, you’re going to take the blindfold off, and you’re never going to try to find us again. I’d recommend you not go home, either, but—well, you’re going to make your own decisions, I guess. Oh, and count slow—we _probably_ won’t waste half an hour making sure you don’t peek, but we _do_ have laser guns, and there _is_ a war on. So.”

“You—but—I—”

“Yeah. Welcome to the resistance, pal.”

 

 


	35. Chapter 26: Aximili

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a DOUBLE POST—if you missed Interlude 9, don't forget to go back and check that out.
> 
> Special thanks to all of the readers who sent messages of encouragement over the past few months; it mattered, a lot. The organization I work for (the Center for Applied Rationality) has finished its spring sprint, which means that instead of having four full-time-job-sized things eating up my time, I only have three. Committing to posting the next update by Sunday, June 4th.
> 
> This one may receive some edits in the next few days; depends on whether people have any complaints over at r/rational. Speaking of which, you should go check out r/rational (or if that's too much work, just leave a comment right here ;). As always, I am immensely grateful for each and every word you choose to write about r!Animorphs, and the more you feed me, the more motivated I am to get writing every morning.

**Chapter 26: Aximili**

* * *

 

[A SECOND SUN RISES ABOVE THE HORIZON, ITS BRIGHT, BLUISH LIGHT MIXING WITH THE DEEP MAGENTA OF ITS COMPANION, CHANGING THE COLOR OF EVERYTHING BELOW… 

I thought, and the warm chorus around me received the thought, reverberated with it, refracted and reflected it back so that even as the idea emerged from me I could see it in its entirety—from the outside, from behind, from every possible angle. I could see the ripples of its impact, the way it changed the chorus and was changed by it, and I could _feel_ those ripples, too—was both a part of the experience as well as its witness, was both myself and the others even as their different voices rose and fell in response—as _I_ rose and fell in response.

It was—

Harmony.

(Synchrony.)

‹Synergy.›

‹ _Balance.›_

{—warmth—}

It was all of those and more, _eib_ and _dain_ and something deeper, not merely Aximili and Temrash, nor even a simple union of the two, but also Elfangor and even—incredibly—the shadow of Tom Berenson, some _dain-_ like corner of Temrash that had shaped itself around the human boy with such fidelity that now it thought it _was_ him.

(It was unprecedented, at least as far as Temrash knew. But then, there had never been such a transfer, mind to mind after days of coherence, without the dissolution of the sharing in between. Had they returned to the pool, the shadow would have been washed away—would have been broken up, distributed, absorbed and reintegrated, losing all definition in the process. But somehow, in the leap from Tom’s head to my own, the delicate imprint had been preserved, enough for it to think and feel if not _quite_ rich enough for it to truly live and speak.)

And we were _together,_ all four of us—present with an immediacy I would not have thought possible, the Yeerk neuro-flesh having somehow slowly bridged all of the gaps, worn down all of the barriers, until it now allowed every part of my experience to touch every part of theirs and even forged new connections between parts of my mind that had never before been adjacent.

None of us understood how it had happened—whether it was a fluke, a random accident, a trick of the Ellimist, or whether this would _always_ happen between Yeerk and Andalite—

(—and thus had happened once before—)

—or whether it had somehow emerged from the choices each of us had made, was in some strange way a _decision_ , our own doing.

But whatever the reason, it was beautiful. A thing to be protected, a promise of what could be. We had each of us been thrust higher by the joining, beyond tree-stretch and into cloud-drift, and from our new perspective we could see, for the first time, the true-dark madness of Esplin’s crusade.

“Chinese government declares U.S. leadership ‘clearly compromised,’ will not agree to summit.”

Chaos.

“‘Animorphs’ broadcast tops eight billion views.”

Confusion.

“Russian military sequestered. Putin: ‘The Russian people are united in resolve, and the vermin will find no shelter among us.’”

Mistrust.

“Scheller, Carr, Woodmansee to appear before Senate Committee on Homeland Security. Taylor, Nickerson, Poznanski whereabouts unknown.”

A species turned against itself. A _galaxy_ turned against itself—a handful of lifeforms astonishingly capable of cooperation, of cohabitation, twisted and pitted against one another.

“Israel enacts five-day quarantine at border.”

_Divide and conquer._

“Looting, riots continue as ‘resistance groups’ take to L.A. streets.”

Except that divide and conquer was a _human_ idea, an echo out of the shadow of Tom Berenson. Humans in their strange hermitage could afford to play such games. Among Andalites, that level of disunity meant the ruin of whole continents.

“U.N. endorses ‘Hanson plan’ to decentralize decisionmaking power into prediction markets.”

And among Yeerks, it simply meant death.

“Former SecDef Mattis: ‘Stop making plans the enemy can steal,’ advocates focus on flexibility, autonomy, reactivity.”

 _This is the chaos the Visser seeks. This is what he wants. Somehow,_ this _is a step along the path to his victory._

“Animorphs: all-American or all alien? An analysis.”

 _Why?_ we clamored, myself and Elfangor and Temrash and Tom. To what end? For what purpose? What prize could possibly justify such waste?

“Brazil to host ‘open constitutional convention’ to draft human-Yeerk peace treaty; governor of California calls for censure, sanctions.”

Except that it wasn’t a question—not really. The answer was clear, for all that it was senseless. It took only logic to envision and only emptiness to execute. We simply did not want to face it—did not want to acknowledge that any being—any Yeerk, any Andalite, any fusion of the two—could be so—

So—

{—cold—}

“Short-term housing crisis emerges as final path for global flyover confirmed; two hundred million expected to flood cities along route.”

Marco looked up at the last word, lowering the tablet to his side. “It goes on like that for about three pages,” he said, his voice flat and heavy. “Those’re just the ones with over twenty thousand karma in the past twelve hours.”

We kept our main eyes on Marco as our stalks swept around the circle—another clearing, another campfire, another nondescript patch of Earth. Prince Jake and Sergeant Nickerson, standing rigid like twin trees as the soldiers behind them squatted on stumps, playing cards. Rachel, pacing, her arms bent impossibly after the fashion of humans so that they clasped behind her back. Garrett and Tobias, pretending stone, the smaller boy leaning against the larger, held close by the arm that still had a hand. The newcomer, David, who somehow managed to be looking back at us whenever our eyes turned toward him. Our sibling, Essak-and-Peter, who were silent, saying nothing, their face heavy with what Tom Berenson’s ghost told us was grief and weary despair.

And the true Tom Berenson, coincidentally close to his brother, coincidentally distant from us. We kept our gaze short and light and hopefully unobtrusive—Tom did not like Temrash, which meant that Tom did not like me.

‹ _Focus, Aximili. Priorities.›_

We conferred briefly, myself and Temrash and our respective shadows, a swift interchange of thought and meaning as our four perspectives crashed together and settled into consensus. Temrash made a cautious bid to serve as mouthpiece, and the rest of us acquiesced.

‹How are people acting in the comments?› we asked, Temrash expertly translating the question into smooth, natural human speech. ‹What’s getting upvoted?›

“Everything,” Marco said, his expression sour. “It’s like it was after Ventura, only ten times more. People are all over the place.”

 _Look at what has happened, assume it is the_ intended _result…_

“Still no sign of Yeerk intervention?” Rachel asked.

“Nothing obvious. V3 could be behind a bunch of this in non-obvious ways, though. Obviously.”

“China,” Garrett ventured.

Marco shrugged.

“What’s this flyover thing?” David asked.

Sergeant Nickerson raised a hand, and the circle’s attention shifted toward her. “President Tyagi’s idea,” she explained. “Trying to win the credibility game. Right now, there are so many conflicting perspectives—and so little hard evidence—that people don’t know what to believe. CiC’s ordered the people at Edwards to prep the Bug fighter for a loop around the globe—low altitude and slow when passing over any major population center. Wants everyone to have a chance to see the thing, take pictures, maybe stop claiming that it’s hoaxes all the way down.”

“That—sounds risky.”

“No shit. Any number of people could take a potshot at it, and some of them might have something bigger than a bottle rocket. And it _could_ be bad news the other way around, if there’s some kind of booby trap the eggheads couldn’t find. Last I heard, they were giving each country a chance to say no, just in case somebody’s scared it’s a Trojan horse.”

“They did,” Marco confirmed, as Elfangor and I absorbed the meaning of the phrase _Trojan horse_ from Tom and Temrash. “China, Russia, and North Korea all turned it down. So did Israel, Switzerland, Poland, the Phillipines, Iran. Few other smaller ones. Mostly people said yes, though. Trip includes like seventeen out of the twenty biggest cities on the planet.”

“Um,” Rachel cut in. “What are the odds it _is_ a Trojan horse? I mean, that’s kind of a weird idea to come up with in the first place, and that’s a _lot_ of humans. Doesn’t Tokyo have, like, almost forty million people in it just by itself?”

“When’s the flyby?” Jake asked.

“Day after tomorrow,” Sergeant Nickerson answered. “Starts in about thirty-six hours.”

“Okay,” Jake said heavily. “So we add that to the list.”

A list that already included a small island off the coast of Alaska, a large warehouse in the middle of industrial China, and a basement full of inscrutable, untrustworthy androids—and those were the _less_ desperate options.

 _Stop this,_ we thought, four voices as one. And then—

‹Stop.›

They looked around the circle, searching for the source of the word.

‹It was us,› we said, and then—after only a slight hesitation—‹Aximili.›

They turned toward us, and we struggled to put our thoughts in order, to form them into words of sufficient clarity and cogency. There was something here, something critical—something we would _all_ regret missing, human and Yeerk and Andalite alike.

‹We think we’re making a mistake,› we said slowly. ‹Going about this the wrong way.›

Curiosity. Patience. _Trust._ They looked at us with open, naked confidence, secure in the expectation that the things we had to say were worth listening to.

 _Don’t you see, it’s all backwards,_ this _is what the Visser is trying to kill, and it’s_ working—

‹There’s a technique they teach to Andalite cadets,› we began, carefully feeling our way forward. ‹It turns out, if you ask a cadet to tell you what _might_ go wrong with the plan he’s devised, he almost never produces anything useful. There’s something in the mind that flinches away from thoughts of failure—that only wants to think of the best-case scenario, pretend that bad things never happen.›

We paused as a sudden swell of emotion rose within us, as each individual part of ourselves became intensely aware of just how very far from home it was.

‹You have to _start_ with the assumption of failure,› we continued, doing our best to keep the pain out of our voice. ‹You tell the cadet that it _did_ go wrong, that there was no way it _could_ have succeeded—and then you ask him to explain _why.›_

We turned our main eyes toward Prince Jake, took in the rest of them with a sweep of our stalks. If we could only make them _see_ —

‹The part of the mind which explains—which looks for connections and patterns, seeks consistency and coherence—it’s a different structure entirely. And when you try to tell the _story of failure,_ and you find that it’s easy to tell, easier than the story of success—›

We broke off again. _Help us, Prince Jake,_ we whispered.

But we did not say it aloud.

“We already know this one, Ax,” Rachel said, and I knew—because Tom and Temrash knew—that her tone was meant to be soothing and gentle. “We did that with the Chinese warehouse, remember? When we decided it was probably a trap?”

‹ _No,›_ we said, and this time the frustration was audible. We had given them the wrong thread to pull, said the wrong words. Connections and patterns—there was a revelation here, waiting to be had. We could sense it—feel its hugeness—we just couldn’t quite _see_ it—

_Start over._

‹Look,› we said, trying a different tack. ‹All of this. This chaos, this—this— _unraveling._ This is no plan. It’s the _absence_ of a plan. And the Visser—›

We threw up our hands, only noticing after the fact that the gesture was entirely human.

‹The Visser has not responded. No messages, no visible action of any kind. He is simply _allowing it to happen._ Allowing us to chip away at the edges of his façade, allowing us to erode the machinery he left behind.›

There was a silence.

“Okay,” Prince Jake began—

‹ _Why?›_ we shouted.

Another silence.

“Because he’s—”

‹No,› we broke in—still sharply, but calmer, with less emotion. ‹Not all at once. Not with one brain. The _human_ power—don’t you see? Separately—›

The translator offered up a word.

‹—without _anchoring_ one another.›

We weren’t sure if we had communicated the question—if we had managed to communicate anything at all. But they fell silent, all of them, their faces taking on the look of humans-in-thought—even Tom, though he took a moment to spare us a withering glare first.

And we turned inward as well, the four of us—looking deeper, following the path, trusting the shared instinct that told us there was something to uncover.

_Disunity—isolation—misdirection—outmaneuver—dispatch—_

_America—China—Aftran—Telor—_

_Human—Yeerk—Andalite—Chee—_

“Can we talk now?” Marco asked after a time, his voice brittle.

We nodded, the human gesture this time deliberate.

“So, the _obvious_ answer is—”

‹No,› we broke in again. ‹Sorry—sorry to cut you off, but _no_ , Marco, not like that. Not—not _shaped_ , not _primed_ , not _obvious._ You aren’t—you can’t—›

We trailed off, turning all four eyes to meet his, watching the struggle of emotion on his face, impatience and frustration and curiosity and doubt. He held the silence—deliberately, with difficulty, but he held it.

_Because on some level, he understands._

‹You’re not the only one with thoughts,› we said quietly.

There was another long moment, and then he nodded.

“Okay. Fair enough. One _possibility_ is that he’s not intervening because he can’t. He’s stretched too thin, doesn’t have the resources or doesn’t want to take the risk. Another—”

“Wait,” Garrett interjected. “Should we—I mean, isn’t it somebody else’s turn?”

Marco’s face twisted, and he spun quarter-circle, crossing his arms, but again he held the silence.

“ _I_ was thinking,” Rachel said, cutting the tension, “that maybe the whole _point_ was chaos.”

She straightened as we all turned toward her, her voice steady if perhaps a shade too brash. “Like, he’s smarter than us, right? And he knows it. So maybe the idea is to make things complicated enough that even _he_ can barely stay on top of it, and hope the rest of us can’t keep up. Complicated enough that everybody else ends up chasing their own tails.”

There was a sort of rustling around the circle, as if a breeze had swept past. Half of them were frowning, and Marco turned back, his brow furrowed. “That—”

“—makes sense,” Tobias cut in. “But hang on, should we go around before we dig into any one idea?”

There was a pause, and no one spoke, so he shrugged. “Okay, guess I’ll go. I was thinking—at the factory, we were _ready_ for him, you know? We had weapons. Cameras. Witnesses. If he’d come in guns blazing—maybe he’s too cautious to fall for anything that might be a trap.”

He turned to look at Prince Jake, and the rest of us followed suit.

Jake shrugged, too. “I was mainly just thinking, disappearing was probably the best thing he could have done, as far as the situation on Earth goes. Like, we’re basically at each other’s throats, by now, and the longer things stay uncertain, the worse that’s going to get. Maybe he’s hiding because he doesn’t want to present anything like a unifying threat, that would make us all stop bickering and work together. Like in Ender’s Game or Watchmen or Independence Day.”

There were more frowns, now. More furrowed brows and twisted lips, the unstable confusion of too many plausible answers.

“There’s more,” said Essak-and-Peter, their voice hoarse from lack of use. “Not just the Yeerks on Earth…”

They trailed off, and Tom Berenson picked up the thread. “This could be a ploy,” he said. “We know there’s political tension in the Yeerk command structure. If things on Earth are coming to a head, maybe nobody has time to ask awkward questions, and that’s good for whatever scheme Visser Three wants to railroad through.”

“Or maybe something’s up with the larger war,” Garrett ventured. “Like, it could have nothing to do with us at all. He could be putting out fires somewhere else.”

We looked around the circle. The Animorphs—and Essak-and-Peter—were deep in thought, each staring in a different direction. The adult soldiers remained silent, their eyes dancing back and forth between their playing cards and their leader, Sergeant Nickerson. She herself said nothing.

 _So you see, it doesn’t matter_ which _explanation for the chaos is true, only that the existence of so much of it means it’s_ somehow _instrumental for the Visser—that it’s somehow furthering his aims, must be useful to his goals—_

And then we saw it. The clear answer, the revelation that had been hiding behind our uncertainty—so obvious in retrospect.

_Temrash. Elfangor. Can this be true?_

We examined the idea from multiple angles, subjected it to a whirlwind of skepticism and critique. It withstood the first wave of objections, and the second, and the third. Around us, the human voices were speaking again; we ignored them.

_Quarantine._

Temrash would not have noticed it. Aximili would not have noticed it. Even Elfangor, as heterodox as he had been, might not have been aware—

— _especially if the Ellimist is nudging things into place around the edges._

But Tom Berenson—with the shadow of the human in our mind, we could clearly see a different path, a different way—could imagine interrogations, espionage, prisoners-of-war, could envision propaganda and defection—

‹We must open communications with the Yeerks,› we blurted out, interrupting the other lines of conversation. ‹With the Yeerks, and with the Andalites as well.›

“What—across hyperspace?”

‹Yes. It—›

We hesitated. How much to communicate?

‹This war. It isn’t self-sustaining. It’s not—there isn’t enough pressure to keep it going. The Yeerks want off planet, but that’s _it_ —they don’t have a fundamental _need_ to spread and conquer, just look at Temrash and Essak. And the Andalites are only fighting to stop the expansion.›

“And to eradicate—”

‹Yes,› we agreed, cutting across Essak-and-Peter. ‹But that assessment is based on the assumption that the Yeerks are an inexorable threat. That they can _only_ be defeated through extinction. Once this is understood to be false—›

“But Esplin doesn’t _want_ it to be understood,” Jake breathed.

‹Yes. We have been deceived, all of us—this war is not Yeerks versus Andalites, Yeerks versus humans. We have _all_ been made puppets—by Esplin.›

 

*        *        *

 

“And you never even _questioned_ it? Even after Alloran turned out to have had a Yeerk in his head for _weeks?”_

‹The reasoning seemed sound in and of itself, and the doctrine won us several important battles—›

“—battles Esplin wouldn’t have thrown to you if Yeerk victory was the _real_ goal. God _dammit.”_

It had taken some time to explain. How Alloran’s last memorandum, combined with a few early disasters after listening to rescued hosts, had led the Andalites to fight their defensive war entirely siloed from the enemy. How the Yeerks had responded in kind, meaning that the war had been fought with virtually no communication whatsoever—only the occasional epithet, shouted before a prisoner could be stunned and either infested or liberated.

‹It stands to reason that this is not by chance—that Esplin has in fact put forth _significant_ effort to bring about this result—and therefore that we should attempt to undermine it. At worst, we can muddy the waters ourselves, sow dissent and confusion. And at best—›

“—we can peace treaty this bitch right out from under him.”

“Can you do it, Ax?” Jake asked, leaning toward us and fixing us with a steady look. “Can you actually convince your people?”

“Forget _that,”_ Tom bit out. “Can you actually build a transmitter at all?”

We closed our eyes, all four of them, opening ourselves up to one another. Flickers of information, lines of inquiry, gaps of uncertainty—

‹Essak,› we said. ‹Do you have memories of Bug fighters? Their design, their capabilities?›

Essak-and-Peter nodded.

‹May we join together?›

There was a tense stiffening. ‹For a few moments only,› we hastened to add. ‹We consent to supervision. To guard at gunpoint, even.›

“Ax,” Tobias said, reaching out to rest a hand on the expanse of fur behind our skull. “If Temrash and Essak decide not to let you go—”

‹Oh, come _on,›_ we said, bleeding some of Tom’s inflection into our speech. ‹Seriously? This _whole plan_ relies on people being willing to entertain the idea of peaceful coexistence—peaceful _cooperation._ If you can’t even trust Temrash and Essak with a loaded gun pointed at them—›

There was a long silence in which Jake, Marco, Tobias, and Sergeant Nickerson exchanged several glances and probably several thoughts.

“Fine,” Jake said. “Time-boxed to five minutes. Agreed?”

Essak-and-Peter nodded again. ‹Agreed,› we said. And then, six minutes later—

‹We can do it. We should be able to assemble something using only human technology—based on what we have seen, you have the capacity to manufacture most of what is needed. It would help to have Peter present, given his technical expertise. But—›

“What?”

‹There is one element beyond human engineering. A transponder, for relaying messages across the Z-space manifold. And my cradle does not have one.›

“So you’re saying—”

‹Yes. To pull this off, we need access to a Yeerk ship.›

 

*        *        *

 

“Ax.”

Slowly, slowly, we lifted ourselves out of the quiet of the _hirac,_ turning our attention outwards once more. In the stillness below, sparks of life and awareness that were Essak-and-Peter lapsed back into sleep. They were not with us as fully as Temrash and Elfangor, nor even as fully as Tom, but they _were_ with us, and had remained even as Essak departed.

It was a heady feeling, and it was with difficulty that we forced ourselves to focus.

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

A moment passed in silence.

“Is that supposed to mean something specific?”

‹What?›

“Prince.”

‹Ah.› We thought carefully, leaning heavily on Tom’s sense-of-his-brother and our own memories of Prince Jake on the mesa. ‹Yes. It means something somewhat different from royalty, but there is no simple match for the concept in your mind. When you hear ‘prince,’ we hear—›

We faltered. ‹It is something like ‘one-who-commands,’ except that _command_ is not the word. ‘One-who-owns’ is similarly wrong-but-close. ‘One-who-wields,’ perhaps?›

“Wields? Like—like a weapon?”

‹Perhaps. More like a limb or a tail. A prince holds court in the _eib,_ in the shared space where decisions occur. To name you prince is to say that some portion of our will has been given over to you—that in some part you think _for_ us.›

Prince Jake considered this, a shadow seeming to cross his face. “I don’t know if I like that,” he said.

‹You may order us to drop the title, and you will be obeyed.›

“That’s not—”

He broke off, and then a grin spread slowly across his face. “Was that a _joke?”_

We dipped our head in acknowledgement.

“Seriously, though. Are you sure that’s something you want to do? I mean, something _you_ want to do, and not—not something you—”

‹Inherited?›

“It _did_ start right when you and Temrash—”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

‹It began sooner than that,› we said. ‹We simply weren’t ready to admit it until then.›

Prince Jake’s mouth twisted in a way that Tom found deeply familiar, and he dropped his eyes toward the ground. “Fine,” he said, his tone strangely hollow. “Any conditions I should know about? Expectations? Responsibilities?”

‹Only that you bear the burden of my remembrance, should I fall at your command.›

He nodded solemnly, and for a moment we lapsed back into silence, the only sound the chorus of insects in the nearby foliage.

After a time, he spoke again. “We’re in on the Bug Fighter,” he said simply. “Nickerson’s been in contact with Tyagi, and she gave us the all-clear a few minutes ago. They’re hoping the broken one has what you need, but if not, they’re at least theoretically willing to have you take a look at the one Visser Three dropped off.”

He fixed me with a level look. “I take it I don’t need to say a whole lot about how the one Visser Three dropped off is _way_ more likely to be bugged or booby trapped or otherwise unpleasant?”

‹Understood.›

“Good.” Leaning back, Prince Jake stretched out along the ground, folding his arms behind his head to form a cushion, his eyes turned up toward the sky. We followed his gaze with our stalks, noting the faint haze that still lingered after Ventura, dimming and haloing the sun.

‹There are some complications,› Prince Jake continued in private thought-speak, seeming to make a point out of not looking in our direction.

‹Surprise, surprise,› we answered, following his lead and giving no sign.

He frowned, his gaze flickering toward us, and we hesitated, wondering what—

Oh.

 _Surprise, surprise_ , spoken in that tone, with that cadence—it was a phrase Tom Berenson uttered often and easily, under just such circumstances.

Well. It wasn’t as if we were _hiding_ the fact that Tom was a part of us. We simply hadn’t chosen to flaunt it, given the true Tom’s continued—and justified—wariness.

‹Yeah,› Prince Jake continued, letting the moment pass. ‹A few things. First off, you’re going to be meeting directly with Tyagi, and she’s going to want you to talk to the leaders of a few other countries, if you’re willing. Apparently Nickerson’s had orders to try to nudge us toward a rendezvous since the beginning, and was going to start pushing for it hard this afternoon if we hadn’t got there first.›

‹We are willing.›

‹Okay. Second. They’ve got the heads-up that you and Temrash are cooperating, but that doesn’t mean they’re thrilled about it. They wanted Temrash to leave your head as long as you were working directly on the fighter—›

‹What—›

‹—but I talked them down to doing an acquire-check. Which means Tyagi herself, since I don’t think any of the other morphers will be at the Bug fighter site, and if they are I doubt they have clearance.›

‹Ah.›

‹Right. You got any reservations about one of the most politically powerful humans on Earth having access to your DNA and memories?›

‹A moment to think, please.›

‹Go for it.›

_This decision results in your death, and the ruin of everything you hope to achieve._

_How?_

It was easy to think in generalities— _oh, Tyagi is an agent of Visser Three,_ or _Tyagi is eventually captured by Yeerks who extract information out of her_ —but generalities were not to be trusted.

What _specific_ chain of events would lead from the human president acquiring me to eventual ruin, and how likely was that chain of events?

We thought for several long moments, assigning probabilities, weighing various uncertainties. And in the end—

‹We accept.›

‹Okay. Just to be sure—you’re not, like, carrying secret codes to the Andalite shield generator, or anything like that?›

‹No. We—I wasn’t even done with secondary training when I snuck aboard Elfangor’s fighter. We don’t have any strategic information about the Andalites that Alloran doesn’t have.›

‹What about Temrash? So far, we think Visser Three doesn’t know that any of Aftran survived.›

‹If he discovers Temrash through Tyagi, that means he’s _also_ discovered Tyagi, which means he knows about Paul Evans playing decoy in the White House, which seems more important in any case. We’re willing to take the risk if you are.›

Prince Jake said nothing, instead broadcasting a wordless burst of grim approval. ‹All right. Next. Marco had a thought—we don’t even know if this is technically feasible, but we thought we’d bounce it off you anyway. Is it possible to use whatever communication device you’re cobbling together to do detection? Like, could you—I dunno—ping their radar, or whatever? Find out what lines of communication the Yeerks have open?›

‹The Visser will almost certainly have obscured things once the Bug fighter crashed,› we pointed out. ‹It’s at least theoretically possible, and we can try, but you shouldn’t get your hopes up.›

‹Eh, it was a long shot anyway. Okay, next. The new kid.›

‹David?›

‹Yeah. Turns out, the _other_ reason Nickerson was going to push for us to come back into the fold is that she’s under strict orders—from the president herself—to bring Jeremiah Poznanski’s kid back to him.›

We paused for a moment, conferring with the shadow of Tom Berenson. ‹Is that—normal? Under these circumstances? For the leader of an entire nation to prioritize a single parent-child bond—›

‹Tobias had the same objection. Answer is, no, it’s not normal, but it’s also not _completely_ unbelievable. Way Tobias tells it, Tyagi and Poznanski would’ve left the White House together, and probably would’ve stayed together this whole time. There’s a chance she’s doing it for personal reasons, and there’s a chance she’s testing the waters on principle, trying to see whether we’re going to break the rules of engagement.›

‹And there’s a chance it’s more significant than that?›

‹Yeah. We talked to David—we weren’t going to make this call without his input—and he was surprisingly okay with the idea, compared to how hysterical he was right after the broadcast. Seems like morphing’s given him a bit of a confidence boost, shifted his sense of the power dynamic.›

‹What does this have to do with us?›

‹Right. So. Poznanski—the father—he’s in the same place Tyagi is. We were going to put you and David together, probably along with two or three others for backup. Peter, for sure. Probably either Rachel or Tobias. The rest of us will stay outside with the cube and some firepower, just so they don’t get any funny ideas. But the thing is—›

He broke off. ‹Well. If things get hairy with David—if he wants out and they don’t want to let him go—›

He broke off again. ‹The kid’s not that important to us. Yet, anyway. But there’s a line there that we can’t have crossed. He’s one of us, now. On our team. So if it comes down to it, you guys do what it takes to protect him. On principle.›

‹Understood,› we said. ‹Was that all?›

‹No. Two more bits. First, there was one headline Marco didn’t read aloud—didn’t want to call it to Nickerson’s attention. Couple of days ago, someone made three different donations to animal shelters— _big_ ones, more than a million dollars each. Money was earmarked for dogs specifically—keep them from getting put down, help them find new homes. This make sense to you? You know what I’m talking about?›

‹Yes. We understand dog shelters.›

‹Okay. Well, we don’t actually know if all three donations were from the same source, and we don’t know if there were maybe _more_ than three. But the name on at least one of those checks was Victor Chee.›

‹Victor—›

‹Chee, yes. And no, somehow I _don’t_ think our immortal robot buddies suddenly got impatient and decided to get more involved. I think somebody’s sending them a message, and _Victor Chee_ sounds a whole lot like—›

‹Visser Three. You think he’s trying to—to—›

‹Recruit them, or at least loosen our grip on them. Yeah, it looks like it. It’s what _we’d_ try to do, anyway.›

‹Two days ago—›

‹Right after they bought up all the oatmeal. Seems like maybe we tipped our hand a little too much, and now V3 is finally paying attention.›

‹That—doesn’t seem good,› we said, all parts of ourself in total agreement.

‹No, it does not.›

‹Is the last bit worse?›

‹No. Just a thought. Putting the Andalites and the humans in touch, maybe getting the Yeerks some kind of independent news access—that makes sense, seems good. Might end the war, but even if it doesn’t it’s the kind of thing that will probably end up saving lives. But it occurred to us that there’s one _other_ way to shortcut the influence that Visser Three is having on things—›

‹We are unlikely to have any kind of opportunity to carry out an assassination—›

‹I know. Just—two things. First, keep your eyes open. Intelligence, tech, allies—anything that looks like it might come in handy, if we find an opportunity to take him out. And second—well—›

He hesitated, and sat up straight, turning to face me with his small, human eyes. “I just wanted to be perfectly clear, with everyone, so there are no misunderstandings,” he said, speaking aloud. “That’s an opportunity we _will_ take, if we come across it.”

We sensed that Prince Jake wanted the silence to linger, so we let it. And then, after an appropriate amount of time—

‹Understood, Prince Jake.›

 

*        *        *

 

“Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, brother of Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, warrior cadet, scion and representative of the Andalite people. It is my honor to welcome you here—to Edwards Air Force Base, to the United States of America, and to planet Earth. My name is Najida Tyagi, President and Commander-in-Chief.”

From a distance, she gave a slight bow, lowering her eyes and spreading both of her hands apart. “You’ll have to forgive my lack of etiquette,” she said, rising gracefully back up to tree-stretch. “We are unfamiliar with the ways of your people. If there is a customary greeting, I would be grateful to learn it.”

‹Your handshake is a fitting custom,› we said, some mix of Temrash and Elfangor firmly in control as we stepped forward. With our stalk eyes, we could see the guards around the edges of the room very deliberately _not_ stiffening with apprehension, and a part of us was impressed almost against our will.

Then again, they _had_ already wrapped our tail-blade in what felt like forty-nine layers of thick, soft fabric. At the same time that they had scanned us for weapons, and taken David away to meet his father, and utterly failed to notice Rachel-the-housefly detaching herself from our body and flying off to find a safe corner to demorph—or at least, utterly failed to _react_ to it.

‹The honor of this meeting is ours as well,› we broadcast, still in formal tones. ‹We are young and half-trained, with no official station, and you show us respect beyond expectation.›

We reached out, took the extended hand, and shook it twice, firmly, as we had practiced, feeling a brief lethargy pass over us as we did so.

“I understand that I also greet Temrash three-one-three and Essak nine-seven-four,” Tyagi continued, making no public mention of the fact that she had just acquired Aximili’s pattern. “Heirs of Aftran and survivors of the tragedies at Ventura. I bid you welcome, with thanks for your trust, and with hope for the eventual peace between our peoples. My condolences for your loss.”

“Thank you, Madam President,” murmured Essak-and-Peter.

‹We thank you also, President Tyagi,› we said, feeling a surge of warmth and surprise in the part of us that was Temrash. ‹Would that we might have met under more pleasant circumstances.›

“Indeed,” the woman said, nodding, her bearing straight and her eyes bright. “Still, we have this chance to build bridges, and I intend not to waste it.” She paused for a moment, her eyes moving back and forth between us and Essak-and-Peter. “Is the plural form of address typical, for two in your position?”

‹There is no ‘typical,’ as far as we know,› we answered. ‹For various reasons, we may very well be unique, and distinct in kind from Essak-and-Peter. We will take no offense at any form of address.›

“But you’re not—for example—sometimes Temrash, and sometimes Aximili?”

‹No. We are currently in a state of cooperation, and both present in equal measure.›

“Do you differ in opinion on important subjects?”

Our stalks twisted to meet the eyes of Essak-and-Peter. ‹Less and less, as time passes,› we said. ‹There is only so long you can understand a viewpoint exactly as someone else does before you must, in some sense, converge.›

She fixed us with a long, steady look. “Then tell me—speaking in no _official_ capacity, but merely as individual representatives of the Yeerk and Andalite species—what do _you_ think of the covert war taking place on and around my planet?”

We spoke without hesitation. ‹It must end, in peace, before it destroys us all.›

“May I repeat those words aloud, for our record of this conversation?” She gestured toward a pair of cameras in a corner of the room, one of several lining the walls.

‹You may.›

“Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill and Temrash three-one-three, having come of their own free will in the hopes of opening lines of communication between humans, Yeerks, and Andalites, when asked my previous question, answered ‘It must end, in peace, before it destroys us all.’ This I state for the record, before these witnesses, giving them every chance to rebut or otherwise respond.”

We gave a slow nod of assent, somewhat taken aback by the stiff, overt formality of her pronouncement.

_Then again, she is recording this moment for all of her species, as a rebuttal against the story spun by Visser Three. It must by necessity carry weight._

“Essak nine-seven-four, have you anything to add?”

“No, Madam President, except that—”

They broke off as Essak-and-Peter’s face screwed up with emotion, as their throat seemed to constrict. “Except that my commanding officer—Visser Three, known to you as Esplin—gave the order to murder two hundred thousand of his own troops—two hundred thousand of my siblings—without warning, simply because it _might_ cover his previous mistakes. You lost half a million of your citizens in that same attack. He—”

They broke off again, stiffening with resolve. “He is a murderer, and a war criminal, and as much a threat to his own species as he is to humanity.”

President Tyagi nodded gravely. “Thank you, Essak. And—Peter Levy. Do you—does he have anything he wishes to add?”

“Only that having Essak in my head kept me alive, Madam President.”

“And do you say that while Essak is _not_ in your head?”

Essak-and-Peter twisted their lip. “You _have_ to be suspicious, Madam President. We understand that. Certainly the Yeerks haven’t done anything to deserve your trust yet. But—”

They paused, and took in a breath. “Setting aside that they came as conquerors. Setting aside that they lied and murdered and infiltrated and enslaved. Just imagine _what they are._ What they want, what they can do.”

Essak-and-Peter glanced toward the cameras, toward the guards standing ready. “Esplin was telling the truth about Yeerks in their natural state,” they continued quietly. “Deaf, blind, and mute. Stuck. The only way they can see—the only way they can hear—the only way they can _participate_ in the larger world is by taking a host. And then they have a few precious days before they have to return to the pool, before another shard takes their place. For every host, a thousand Yeerks—ten _years_ of waiting, for three days of freedom.”

We could feel our own heart stirring—not just the part of ourselves that was Temrash, but Aximili and Elfangor and even Tom.

“And they’d do _anything_ to change that. To get a little more. They don’t have to _rule_ , they just—want to _share._ And in exchange—”

They raised their hands in emphasis, the gesture an eerie mirror of one we had seen Marco make time and time again. “Think of the _possibilities._ The _applications._ A Yeerk can fine-tune the body, altering hormone balances, changing respiration and digestion, staving off atrophy. They can keep the heart beating in the event of sudden injury, detect brain cancer or aneurism before it gets to be too late. Mental illness—the therapist is right there, in your head. Personal training—same deal. They can help with balance, coordination, reaction times, make you a better dancer or gymnast or pitcher.

“And they can _teach._ They can transfer knowledge and skills and memory—imagine a school where Yeerks help transfer language, mathematics, history. Imagine having access to every scrap of knowledge from every host that every Yeerk your Yeerk connects with has ever had. Imagine the impact on empathy. On communication. On conflict resolution—on prosecution and defense. Tutors, trainers, therapists, translators. And you don’t—we could—you don’t have to—”

They broke off again, and the part of us that was Aximili could feel the pain and tension, the _need to communicate_ this thing that was so important, but so hard to say—

“—we don’t have to be _alone_ anymore.”

There was a heavy silence, as Essak-and-Peter covered their face with their hands. “Sorry,” they whispered. “Our—my wife. She—she disappeared two years ago and—”

They looked up, meeting the eyes of President Tyagi. “Nothing made any difference until Essak,” they said simply.

Tyagi took a deep breath, her eyes tracing around the room. “It’s clear that there’s a lot for us to discuss,” she said, and we could see her calculating the impact Essak-and-Peter’s words would have on the others in the room, the others who would one day watch the recordings. “And that the possible benefits of cooperation are not to be dismissed offhand. I would particularly like for you to speak with the prime ministers of Germany and Japan, should it be possible to arrange it. They were once our bitterest enemies, fighting against us in a war of eradication, and have since become trusted, steadfast allies. We have much to learn from history’s example.”

‹Indeed,› we said, breaking silence on impulse. ‹Especially when you consider that the Yeerks had not yet even conceived of worlds beyond their own when you started your term of office three years ago.›

We could see the impact of _those_ words, the way the humans around the room rocked back as if physically struck. Tyagi showed the smallest reaction, with only a slight tightening of the skin around her eyes—she had clearly already considered the fact, and recognized its import.

“Indeed,” she echoed, and we thought we could detect grim satisfaction in the word. “But first—there is a laboratory waiting with your name on it.”

 

*        *        *

 

In the end, it was easy.

‹The priority is opening a communication channel,› we had said. ‹Explaining the technology can come later.›

And they had agreed, and so we had proceeded with the bare minimum of explanation, even as the human technicians watched and recorded everything. We had asked that we be allowed to work in private, but that request had been—unsurprisingly—denied. That made things more difficult—riskier, harder to juggle—but not impossible.

The ruined Bug fighter had not, in fact, been equipped with an interstellar communicator, but it was simple enough to extract three of the transponders from the hyperdrive and repurpose them to triangulate and transmit Z-space signals. We had worried that the fighter’s computer might be incapable of telepathic interfacing, and that we would have to summon the cradle, but fortunately it was identical to the computer in an Andalite raptor. The Yeerks, it seemed, had simply duplicated the stolen technology circuit for circuit, slapping a set of manual controls on top rather than bothering with a bottom-up redesign.

‹You will have some difficulty with transcription, we imagine, given that both Andalite and Yeerk communication is largely ungrammatical.›

“We thought about that, yeah,” said the tech. “The linguists have started to work up a simple visual language that we were hoping you’d take a look at, before the call.”

‹Maybe once we’re done here. We estimate no more than another hour or two.›

Moving smoothly, giving no hint or sign of the import of our action, we connected two wires together and carried on talking, using only the third layer of our attention to continue assembling a complicated-looking—and ultimately superfluous—visual projection system. Eventually, the humans would understand the device well enough to wonder, but that point was weeks or months away, and in the meantime—

We had the capacity for communication that was private, undetectable, and entirely secure, at least as far as the humans were concerned.

As for the Yeerks…

With one part of our mind, we kept up our charade, exchanging meaningless words with the human techs as we continued the rote and trivial work of assembling the visual projection system. With the rest, we began the slow and laborious process of encrypting our message—first compressing each nuanced thought into the symbolic code used for asynchronous communication, then converting each symbol into its own number according to the standard translation scheme, and then finally processing each number into ciphertext using the multiterm function taught to each cadet in their first cycle of training.

_1 7 13 2 2 8 1 2 2 11 1 0 4 12 0 3 12 13 5 0 9 9 9 3 5 10 11 3 11 8 5 6 8 …_

It was difficult work even when one’s attention was _not_ divided, and we strained to hold the lengthening chain in our mind as we processed each additional digit. This would keep the initial message secure from Yeerk intrusion until a direct link could be established…

‹Interplanetary communications,› we thought, tuning the device harmonics to the appropriate settings. ‹Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. 11 5 5 6 4 7 12 11 4 0 9 8 4 3 11 9 7 3 2 9 5 1 0 8 6 0 1 8 10 12 7.›

That string, generated via my own private function and decodable with its public sibling, would allow the communications officer on the far end to confirm my identity, before using the private sibling of the military’s own public function to read the larger message.

‹1 7 13 2 2 8 1 2 2 11 1 0 4 12 0 3 12 13 5 0 9 9 9 3 5 10 11 3 11 8 5 6 8 7 11 2 2 12 2 10 11 11 10 12 2 2 5 10 9 1 1 13 5 5 3 12 8 13 9 2 3 2 11 3 13 12 0 1 10 0 12 11 5 8 1 8 6 9 5 0 13 11 13 0 12 0 13 1 6 13 10 2 5 1 1 4 9 1 11 3 1 12 2 1 0 1 7 1 4 2 10 13 13 5 9 2 3 12 4 12 6 4 9 12 5 5 13 5 1 9 11 1 8 5 11 8 5 13 11 7 10 4 12 4 4 4 0 5 3 3 1 6 2 11 12 4 4 8 3 9 7 4 0 4 5 4 9 0 1 3 6 12 1 8 8 13 7 2 4 4 8 1 5 11 2 8 13 3 3 9 12 12 0 3 11 6 7 3 8 10 12 11 8 10 10 6 6 7 12 10 9 3 8 11 4 10 9 1 2 5 12 1 9 11 0 11 12 4 4 8 4 7 10 12 13 5 2 0 11 6 5 12 4 8 12 2 5 4 4 6 8 11 0 9 8 7 7 13 1 0 6 11 6 1 10 6 0 4 6 4 3 10 11 0 8 6 8 8 10 10 8 11 9 0 11 6 9 5 8 3 7 12 5 4 8 2 1 5 9 11 2 2 8 6 8 10 8 3 13 5 13 8 2 13 9 13 11 4 11 2 1 13 1 2 13 1 11 6 13 2 4 12 11 4 0 1 2 11 3 4 13 1 7 1 8 12 12 0 2 12 5 5 4 1 0 9 1 11 0 12 3 9 4 9 9 4 3 10 13 0 3 13 4 12 0 11 9 3 11 8 11 4 1 3 6 11 5 3 0 6 1 8 11 9 9 6 4 12 2 9 2 8 10 13 8 13 4 2 6 7 4 9 1 8 0 0 13 7 8 6 13 7 2 9 1 6 4 10 2 9 10 5 11 0 2 2 13 5 8 6 0 0 7 4 13 10 10 1 0 0 8 8 2 9 13 5 6 8 0 12 12 6 4 0 12 11 8 10 8 5 11 7 1 7 0 0 4 8 1 3 8 1 6 4 9 7 0 11 2 11 4 0 3 6 6 11 11 2 7 10 0 3 2 9 9 2 9 9 1 9 0 4 0 13 12 7 11 7 11 6 3 4 8 11 2 7 3 7 0 4 3 13 1 6 4 2 10 11 13 1 9 8 0 2 12 5 2 1 8 10 2 6 7 13 7 5 12 8 0 6 10 5 11 2 0 2 6 5 10 12 5 12 10 13 1 10 8 2 9 2 0 3 0 11 8 10 2 2 8 1 1 6 6 10 6 12 5 6 13 9 9 4 9 7 5 4 1 1 4 0 11 4 2 13 3 0 12 12 13 3 6 0 1 11 0 4 4 13 8 1 4 0 13 11 6 2 13 13 10 5 11 6 4 11 6 3 11 0 0 2 7 13 0 13 11 4 10 2 0 5 0 4 6 0 7 1 13 11 9 6 4 6 8 9 10 3 7 5 7 3 6 0 1 7 4 8 9 1 1 5 5 5 8 10 5 5 0 0 13 8 13 13 6 3 4 2 11 8 1 10 2 4 10 10 2 7 9 7 13 1 8 3 3 13 13 1 2 0 12 9 13 0 12 5 9 6 0 10 2 13 3 6 6 8 13 1 8 5 8 12 1 10 1 7 8 10 1 0 8 13 2 10 12 5 9 11 0 1 6 8 … ›

 _Subordinate of war-prince Oloro-Menjium-Habrymaur, assigned to_ Galaxy Tree, _rank authorization five,_ dain _Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, rank authorization one. Reporting from sector eight-three-seven, local name Earth, urgency authorization two. Content of report: confirmed death of Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, confirmed location of Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, primary materiel threat to war effort. Unsecure channel, limited access. Please reply with top priority via direct link._

Thought-speak could not be eavesdropped upon by any known means—it could be _detected,_ but not decrypted. Discrete messages sent through Z-space were vulnerable, but the direct, mind-to-mind link in the _eib_ was impossibly complex and nuanced; one would need a perfect copy of the complete brain state of each of the involved parties before one could even _begin_ to tease out the meaning of the various ripples and reflections and modulations of the waveform. For that reason, messages were almost always inferior to a direct link, in which the transponders served as a neutral blank slate upon which both minds could write their shared understanding.

Keeping our primary attention poised and ready for a response, we continued our pretense of focus with the scraps of metal and plastic, chatting amiably with the human engineers as we added to the slowly growing device. It was difficult to prevent any outward sign of tension or excitement, and the part of us that was Temrash reluctantly took control, quieting our muscles and stemming the flow of chemicals in our circulatory system.

Soon we would be in contact with the homeworld again. With our superior officers, our fellow cadets—possibly even our parents. With Andalites, in any case.

The possibility—the _proximity—_ had awakened something deep within us, a heartsick longing we had long since relegated to the background, a fervent need for connection that had never truly been slaked by the companionship of the Animorphs or even by the intimate embrace of Temrash. Soon, the _eib_ would thrum with a voice that was not our own, and we would be part of a harmony once more—

There was a wave of opposition, fear and caution and a hint of disgust, and we pulled back slightly—moderating our eagerness, opening up to dissent.

Temrash was wary—both of discovery, and of what they saw as the potential for coercion, for brainwashing. Could we _actually_ resist the pressure of conformity, given how desperate we were for connection—for approval?

Elfangor was cautious as well—cognizant of the risk of a misstep, and mindful of the potential magnitude of the consequences. It was possible that we would have only one chance.

And Tom—

{—guilt—}

{—anxiety—}

Tom did not like the fact that we had not warned the others.

But in the end, for all that we had grown, had exceeded the boundaries of ourself, we were still Aximili at heart. And we had been alone for far, far too long.

 _Besides,_ we reasoned. _The humans are not impartial. Cannot be, so long as they are tied to a single world, and under threat of total enslavement. This is a path that only we can see, and therefore only we are fit to guide others along it._

We felt the hollowness of the thought even as we put our weight behind it, and ripples of doubt echoed through out shared mind, but by this point, the doubt was merely a pretense. The message was sent, would have already been received, and a reply would come as soon as—

‹Cadet Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, you are seen and heard. Ithileran-Halas-Corain, interplanetary communications. Urgency authorization two denied, urgency authorization three assigned. Maintain vigilance and expect further communication within a seventh of a subcycle.›

Shock.

Dismay.

Disbelief.

 _Wait—_ cautioned a voice. _Stop, and think—_

But it was too late, the voice too quiet.

‹Ithileran-Halas-Corain, we appeal your decision. Cannot wait—›

{—how long is—}

(An hour and a half. Be silent.)

‹—and have urgent information for the high council. We may not be able to achieve private communication again. There is—›

_STOP—_

‹—potential for peace, and also great threat. Seven billion hosts, more intelligent than Hork-Bajir, with dexterity on par with Andalites. They have early interplanetary capability and the Visser’s fleet is inbound. There is a resistance—blood has been shed, and—›

 _—and they have the Iscafil device,_ we had tried to say, but Temrash had intervened, had mustered every scrap of strength and strangled the last bit of thought. For a dark and infinite moment, we wrestled for control amongst ourselves, losing even the ability to move our hands, to carry on our conversation with the human technicians—

“Sir? Are you all right?”

—and then, mercifully, we stabilized, a wave of shame lowering Aximili and rebalancing our mind with Tom and Temrash in control and unopposed. Temrash triggered a memory, and the smell of cinnamon washed across our consciousness, sending Aximili cringing still further.

‹We are fine,› we said, careful to keep our tone light and easy. ‹A thought occurred to us—a possible modification of the communicator, to—›

_—what was it, Prince Jake’s idea—_

‹—do some kind of radar or echolocation, see if we could detect at least the location and direction of Yeerk communications, if not their actual content.›

Looks of wild excitement—

‹But it didn’t seem possible, on second thought. After the crash, the Visser would have been sure to guard against that form of detection.›

Breaking disappointment—

“Okay, sure. But we should make sure to get the details from you anyway, once we’re done here, just in case our techs can think of a new angle on it—”

‹Certainly.›

The words continued as our hands began to move again, continuing their useless, redundant work.

 _That,_ we thought coldly, _was a disaster._

Ashen acknowledgement.

_We will be lucky if they don’t simply send a bomb._

Black anguish.

_We must recover. We should bring Elfangor to the forefront._

Desperate agreement.

A subtle shift, a change in state—as if an object had been rotated, was clearly the same but with a different set of evident properties. We sent a soothing memory toward the part of us that was Aximili, the feel of two tails entwined—

‹Cadet Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, your appeal is granted. Further review has resulted in urgency authorization one. Stand by for direct link.›

{—fear—}

_Reassurance._

We reached into the half-emptied husk of the fighter’s control panel, digging for further distractions—

_PRESENCE._

Even after steeling ourselves, we were almost overwhelmed by the wash of sensation, like water after days of dust. The _eib,_ so silent for so long, filled with music, a hum that we found ourselves instinctively moving to complement—

_Steady._

‹Cadet Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, reporting in deference.›

We did not speak in words, of course. The thoughts simply _were._

‹Absent without leave. Incommunicado for seven and seven cycles. And now belligerent. Grasping. Above your station.›

‹I am sorry, command—›

‹I am Lirem-Arrepoth-Terrouss, cadet.›

‹Chancellor!›

Alloran’s successor, the most esteemed veteran of the entire military, and the leader of the council. It was whispered that he had Alloran and Seerow _both_ as _dain_.

‹You have grasped my attention, and now you waste it.›

A tidal wave of disapproval crashed over us, eroding away Aximili, undermining Elfangor, and giving even Tom and Temrash pause. It moved with the full force of an ocean, backed by an absolute confidence, a certainty as reliable and unyielding as physics. _This is the truth,_ it said. _All know it, and none question it._ It was the Path itself, personified and weaponized, and I was all alone in failing to be on it.

I _was_ wasting time. I _was_ grasping above my station—

_NO._

Deep within me, something rallied—something alien and unafraid, something for which the idea of the Path held no meaning. Some part of me—of _us_ —that remembered Aftran, remembered being vast beyond measure, with tendrils stretching across a city, a mind that moved ten thousand bodies. It knew itself diminished, but still it remembered, and it rose to meet the pressure in the _eib_ like a boulder in a stream, forcing the waves to part around it.

‹Were I to waste it seven times more, and yet deliver my message, you would still depart in gratitude,› Temrash declared, as Aximili and Elfangor and Tom rallied behind them. ‹I have seen our final chance, as a people.›

There was the sense of something pulling up short, of being weighed and measured. ‹What is this?› Lirem asked sharply, the thought shaded with subtle meaning. _You were cringing not a hoofbeat hence, and now you stand at tree-stretch, addressing me as an equal. Explain yourself._

We ignored it. ‹The Yeerks do not prosecute this war of their own free will,› we said. ‹They have been levered, manipulated. They will accept peace, if it is offered to them—and if the Visser no longer spurs them to action.›

‹Impossible,› Lirem spat. Not that the Yeerks had been manipulated, nor that they would accept peace, but that the Andalite people should sue for it. We are _winning_ , said that thought—and what warrior would surrender on the path to victory?

‹You turn all of your eyes in the same direction,› we sneered, allowing a hint of Yeerkish arrogance to shade the insult. ‹The Visser shows you what he wants you to see—everywhere, the Yeerk tide slowing, the Andalites pressing forward. And meanwhile, where is _he?›_

Lirem said nothing, and the contempt within me swelled. _This is what happens,_ we told ourselves. _This is what happens when all are unified, when all think the same thoughts at the same time._ No wonder Elfangor had spent so much time in the deep, cold darkness—how much sooner would he have seen it than Lirem?

‹He is here, on Earth, ensuring that human and Yeerk do not ally against him, finding common cause in peace and prosperity—just as he turned Yeerk against Andalite. He is here, stoking the fire, readying a blaze that will leave the galaxy a cinder—unless you negotiate a peace _now.›_

We could _feel_ Liram yielding, see the _eib_ from the outside in a way that had never been possible when we were only Aximili, and enveloped by it. His convictions were set, but they could be bent—reshaped—with the right amount of pressure in just the right places—

‹Seven _billion,_ Lirem. You cannot face that. Not without a united galaxy at your tail. You fight, and you fight, and the strength of every species wanes—Hork-Bajir, Taxxon, Naharan, Andalite. How many have died in the last revolution? How many will survive the next?›

Uncertainty. Hesitation. Apprehension.

‹Look at all that has transpired, Lirem. Imagine that it was all by design. _What is this design? What plan encompasses this madness, and what is its end?›_

Panic—

‹Sue for peace, Lirem. We were noble, once—honorable in battle and generous in victory. We need not pursue the Yeerks into nothingness, fueling their desperation, prolonging the struggle. We can call for a cease-fire, draw the lines as they lie, and let the tools of statecraft handle the rest. What care we, in any case? They have no Andalites save one, the Taxxons came of their own free will, and the Naharans have no world to return to anyway.›

Terror—

‹You are wrong!› Lirem shouted, the parts of him that had started to buckle under the pressure suddenly reversing, springing back into place. ‹Wrong! Wrong! Hopelessly naïve! The foolish whims of an untrained cadet, the dull confidence of a groundling idiot! You know _nothing!_ Desbadeen has fallen! The battle over Gara has begun anew! There are Leeran Controllers on every pool ship, and spies upon the homeworld! It is by the barest luck that we have kept the _Iscafil_ device from them, or all would already be lost! They have cowed even the Skrit-Na!›

Each new claim in the list landed like a hammer blow, and we reeled, the tables turned once more as Lirem unbottled his fear and rage. The pressure in the _eib_ doubled, then doubled again, and it was only our desperate need to know that kept us from severing the connection, turning tail and fleeing—

‹The homeworld?› we asked, even the part of us that was Temrash shaken by the news.

‹A secret task force intercepted, an assassination carried out—even a bombing in the ancient caves. Cowards, defectors, traitors abandoning the Path—›

There was a turning sensation, and the pressure in the _eib_ strengthened again as Lirem focused his full attention on us, every layer like a spotlight. ‹And _you_ ,› he spat. ‹Prodigal protégé, wandering whelpling. Tales of seven billion hosts! Where? Your exact coordinates, now!›

We couldn’t help it, did not even have time to _think_ about resisting before the knowledge was spilling out of our head and into the aether.

‹Rate, direction, and shape of orbit!›

More numbers, streaming into the void as we recovered our poise.

‹Whereabouts of Visser Three!›

‹Stop,› we said, a shadow of our previous confidence returning. ‹This is not the way.›

‹ _Whereabouts of Visser Three!›_

‹ _No,›_ we insisted. ‹We do not _win_ that way. This is his fortress—it is out _there_ that he is vulnerable, if you only—›

‹You have a method of leaving the planet?› Lirem demanded.

‹Yes—the cradle—but—›

‹Then you have seven cycles to do so,› he said. And it was then, in the fractional silence between one thought and the next, that we realized our mistake.

Lirem-Arrepoth-Terrouss was not alone.

Lirem-Arrepoth-Terrouss was not alone, and that meant that in order to move him, we had to move _everyone._ All around him were other Andalites—councilmen, aides, soliders, guards—each of them a repository of beliefs, a well of confidence. Crack him, and they would close around him like a shield; change him, and they would change him back. Not through any deliberate process, but simply by the sheer mass of their existence, the ponderous momentum of a thousand harmonious thoughts.

We hadn’t recognized it, hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t prepared for it. Would not even have _noticed the dynamic_ , had we not spent this time alone, outside, and isolated—had never registered it from the inside any more than we were normally conscious of the presence of oxygen. It was so obvious, so familiar, so _true_ that our mind had simply glossed over it, and failed to notice that _we_ had changed, and that our new tactics were different from our old ones, and that we were attempting something that we’d never attempted before—something that perhaps _no one_ had ever attempted before.

We had never had a chance of turning him from his chosen Path.  Not in one conversation, at this distance, with so little formal authority to lean on.  And the one piece of evidence that  _might_ have proven persuasive—that Temrash and Aximili had learned to cooperate—would not have been believed, would have only made things worse.

‹What are you—›

‹We will remove this threat of which you speak,› declared Lirem, the hesitation gone from his voice.  ‹Seven billion is not so many when they are all gathered on a single world.›

‹But the fleet—if you are already stretched thin—›

Lirem scoffed. ‹Cloud-furred fool. This world has not developed shielding technology, correct?›

A sudden instinct told us not to answer, but it was no use. ‹Then all it takes is a simple rock,› he continued. ‹We will time it to arrive in seven cycles—if you have further business with these Earth-people, conclude it by then.›

‹You can’t!› we cried. _The people—the resources—_

The hope.

‹You said it yourself—with those seven billion, he will scour the galaxy clean of all who oppose him. As long as he exists, they are a blade at our backs.›

‹As long as—›

‹Yes, cadet,› Lirem said, and through the _eib_ I could feel his laughter, his smug satisfaction at the restoration of our proper relationship. ‹Your report said that Elfangor is dead—at the Visser’s hand, I must assume. One wonders why you have not _already_ avenged him, but perhaps you needed inspiration.›

Somewhere inside our head, someone was screaming in horror.

‹Either the Visser dies, or the planet does. You have seven cycles, cadet. Make your choice.›

 

 


	36. Chapter 27: Rachel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this from Harvard University, where I got to be a speaker for the Effective Altruism Global conference! Wooo! Also, odds are decent I'll get the next chapter (and a brief interlude) up within two weeks. No promises, but I'm taking more than a week off work, so ...

 

**Chapter 27: Rachel**

‹Rachel.›

I banked, wheeling, and dropped back down toward the squat, featureless hangar.

‹Rachel, this is Aximili. Please—are you near?›

‹I’m here, Ax,› I answered back. Landing on the edge of the rooftop, I looked down at the activity below, soldiers and officers and engineers going about a dozen different errands, moving from building to building or marching in formation or carrying files and folders back and forth across the scorched, dusty ground. ‹What’s up?›

‹We need help.›

Adrenaline, or whatever the avian equivalent was. ‹Where? Are you still in the—›

‹Not that kind of help. Sorry. We—ah—›

There was a silence, and I took to the air again, hoping that my snipe body’s mottled brown form wouldn’t attract too much attention as I looped around the building.

‹We made contact with the Andalite homeworld.›

I peered in the windows as I fluttered past. Most of the activity was incomprehensible—labs and meeting rooms and officers sitting in offices. I couldn’t see into the deeper, inner areas where Ax and the Bug fighter were being kept.

‹It was—in the moment, it seemed wiser to make contact quietly, without human involvement. So that I could explain things. Pave the way.›

‹Uh huh,› I said, banking around another corner. ‹And?›

‹They’ve threatened to send an asteroid to destroy the planet if we don‘t assassinate Visser Three within twenty-three days.›

I nearly fell out of the sky as my wings skipped a beat. Pulling hard, I curved back up toward the roof, perching on the steel gutter at the edge. ‹ _What?›_ I asked.

‹They’ve threatened—›

‹Not that kind of what,› I snapped, trying to reorient. A dozen thoughts all tried to crowd into my head at once, questions and objections and desperate proposals. ‹Can they _do_ that?›

There was a pause, as if Ax were—

As if he were—

_—something—_

‹Yes,› he said, finally.

Another whirl of chaotic half-thoughts. ‹Can we block it somehow?›

‹No.›

‹Could the Yeerks?›

Another long pause. ‹No.›

‹What—›

‹It’s not the sort of weapon people use,› he said quietly. ‹Not the sort of weapon _anyone_ has used, _ever,_ as far as the Andalites know. It’s the sort of thing that’s always been entirely hypothetical. If you were to use it—›

He broke off. ‹There is _no_ defense. The use of such a weapon means all-out war on a scale of—of—›

He faltered again. ‹If you destroy a planet with such a weapon, and there is even _one survivor_ of that planet with a Z-space capable ship, they could retaliate in kind, and—›

I felt my heart beating faster.

‹No one has ever even tried to develop a countermeasure,› he finished, his voice somehow sounding pale.

‹But the Yeerks,› I objected. ‹ _Ventura—›_

‹Not the same,› Ax said grimly. ‹Sorry—let me start over. We’re not talking about aerial bombardment. They’re going to attach a Z-space hyperdrive to a rock—a _small_ rock—and send it toward Earth. And when it drops back into normal space—›

Ax paused, and I felt my heart beating faster.

‹Your momentum coming out of Z-space is effectively arbitrary,› he continued. ‹Most of the time, people choose a speed that’s pretty close to zero, since you have to expend fuel to decelerate in real space. But if you drop out at, say, thirteen fourteenths of the speed of light—you would only need an object weighing about two hundred billion kilograms to blast a giant chunk out of the planet and completely liquefy the crust.›

‹Two hundred billion—›

‹Not even the size of a small mountain. Much smaller than the asteroid that Visser Three used to wipe out Ventura. And there’s absolutely no way to stop it—even if you were to vaporize it completely, the particles would continue forward with almost the same amount of energy, with an equally devastating effect.›

There was another long pause as I struggled to absorb this, my head still spilling over with a mixture of thought fragments and useless panic.

_—what—_

_—three weeks—_

_—what—_

_—talk them out of it—_

_—no—_

_—how it all ends—_

_—what—_

Finally, I spoke.

‹So what do we _do?›_ I asked.

‹We don’t know,› Ax said, sounding almost as shell-shocked as I felt. ‹We were sort of hoping you might have an idea. In particular, within the next forty minutes or so, we will either have to turn over a working communicator, or sabotage it and invent some kind of excuse.›

I could feel the wheels in my brain spinning, skidding, burning rubber—feel my thoughts jerking erratically, like a squirrel in the road that can’t decide which way to run.

_Get a grip—_

But I couldn’t. Everything was unraveling. It was too big—like the time the others had told me about, the time in the pool, except there was no strange arcane god around to explain it all, to give me a clear set of choices, show me the way out.

_There has to be SOMETHING—_

‹Rachel?›

‹I’m _thinking,›_ I snapped. Lied. Hoped. ‹Give me a minute.›

Ax fell silent.

_This is all his fault, what was he THINKING, I should—_

_Should—_

The thought faltered, sputtered out, and died.

Should what? It _wasn’t_ his fault. Not when we’d sent him in there, practically alone—not when he was the only one of us who understood the Andalite power structure, the only one who’d been even _remotely_ likely to pull it off. We’d trusted him to make decisions on his own, and the basis of that trust was still solid even if the results had turned out—

 _Besides, he only started fixing the communicator what—an hour ago? They signed our death warrant in_ minutes.

There was no reason to think Tyagi or Jake or anyone else would’ve done any better. No, we’d lost this one _already_ —had already been doomed, and just hadn’t known it yet.

Three weeks. I wasn’t going to make it to fifteen. I’d already had my last birthday, my last Christmas—

_Stop it. Snap out of this._

—why, though?

 _Because you’ve still got three weeks. Because go down fighting. Because trying_ anything _is better than guaranteed failure._

Slowly—slowly—I dragged myself up and out of the fog, away from the siren song of despair, from half-formed thoughts of getting drunk, losing my virginity, finding a beach and waiting for the end.

_It’s just death. Mom’s already dead. Jordan. Sara. Dad. Cassie._

Cassie.

Cassie, who’d died trying to save as many people as she could. Who’d _spent_ the last minutes of her life, rather than just letting them be taken away from her—

That did it. Suddenly, the wheels caught, and everything snapped back into focus.

‹Okay,› I said, feeling my thoughts lining up, shrugging off the shadow of embarrassment. ‹Okay. Options. Um. Try not to get them to throw the rock in the first place—do you think Tyagi has any chance of changing their minds?›

‹We don’t think so,› Ax answered, still sounding hollow. ‹We think—we think they would just accuse her of being a Controller, and carry on anyway.›

And Ax clearly hadn’t told them about _him_ being a Controller, for obvious reasons. ‹What about back channel? Grassroots stuff? You said this kind of attack is practically taboo—›

‹Maybe. We don’t know if we _can_ access civilian channels with this equipment—if we can get past the safeguards—and even if we do—›

He faltered. ‹They said—we don’t think—the war is not going well. From what they said, the homeworld itself may be under direct threat. With things going that badly—›

He didn’t need to finish the thought. ‹Okay, fine, back burner,› I said. ‹What about—can we sabotage it? The rock, I mean? Stop the launch, or hack the nav computer, or whatever. Like, if we stole the Bug fighter—›

‹No. Or—we mean—stealing the Bug fighter might be possible, but there’s no obvious source for the attack, and Andalite computers are—difficult to hack.›

‹Okay, fine. Fine. So we’ve got steal the ship as a maybe, and broadcast to the Andalites as a _weak_ maybe, and letting Tyagi have a shot because why not. What about the Yeerks? Trying to undercut Visser Three? Maybe using Mr. Levy?›

‹We don’t know. We don’t know whether we should try ourselves, or whether the humans—›

‹Right. Okay. What about—›

‹Rachel, we need to make a decision about the communicator _now.›_

‹Right. Sorry.›

The communicator. Would Tyagi—and Mr. Levy—be more likely to get through to the Yeerks than Ax alone?

 _Yes,_ said Marco’s voice in my head. _Obviously. Trivially obviously, like SUPER duh._

 _Yes,_ agreed my mental image of my cousin.

‹Is it—› I began, and then broke off, the ghost of an idea occurring to me. ‹Is the communicator—is it small enough to fit into a morph? Or, like, can you make two?›

There was a pause. ‹No,› Ax said. ‹But we suspect we could create a link between it and the cradle—›

_Cradle?_

‹—and thereby maintain access even after we leave. The humans will figure it out eventually, and close the channel, but not in—›

He ended the thought abruptly.

_Not in three weeks._

‹Okay, so—we just leave it, right? Leave it to Tyagi and Mr. Levy, and hope for the best? And if we think of anything else, we patch in from a distance.›

‹But what about the deadline?› Ax asked. ‹Should we warn—›

‹ _No,›_ I said firmly. ‹Not yet. First we check in with the others. You said three weeks, right?›

‹Twenty-three days.›

‹Right. So we take a day or two to decide, and we can come back and still say three weeks, if we want to loop everyone else in. But we don’t make that call on our own.›

A whisper of an objection tried to make itself heard in the back of my mind, but before I could grab ahold of it—

‹What if the humans try to connect to the Andalite homeworld?›

‹Don’t let them,› I said. ‹Distract them, or say the lines are busy, or give them the wrong frequencies or whatever. Just put them in touch with the rest of—›

_—what was its name?_

‹—Telor.›

And in the meantime, we would check in with the others, and discuss the rest of our options—like telling the Yeerks, or stealing a Bug fighter to try to find and murder Visser Three.

_Or to escape—_

‹Also, let’s not tell Mr. Levy just yet,› I said. ‹I’m going to go check in on David, and then the three of us should think about getting clear as soon as we can.›

‹Roger,› Ax whispered faintly.

And I took to the sky.

 

*        *        *

 

If you’d asked me—

—because I definitely didn’t think the words on my own, but _if you’d asked me—_

I really wouldn’t have thought that things were going to get worse.

‹It wasn’t me,› David said, his thought-speak voice weak and wavery as the last of the lion’s fur melted away, revealing a bloody, battered face with one eye already swollen shut. ‹It wasn’t me, he made me, I didn’t do it, it wasn’t my—›

His thought-speak cut off abruptly as he passed the halfway point, and he started right up with regular speech, his words an unsettling demonic growl as the lion’s mouth shrank and reshaped itself into that of a human boy. “—wasn’t my fault, I was protecting myself, he _wouldn’t stop,_ he _never stops_ , I swear I didn’t mean it—”

“Quiet,” I said, as my own mouth emerged from the snipe’s beak, trying to make the word gentle and sharp at the same time. As I grew upwards from the floor, I ran my eyes over the scene again, trying to take stock.

The room was stark and cramped—clearly military, all brown and gray and olive and beige. There wasn’t much in it in the first place, so the wreckage was limited—one smashed coffee table, one couch with torn, stained upholstery, and one shattered liquor bottle in the corner. The smell of alcohol filled the room, clashing with the sharp, coppery scent that had only recently become so familiar—

“Is that your dad?”

The body was lying on its back, with a bloody quadruple slice across its chest, more slashes on its arms and neck, and a head twisted around almost backwards. I could see the deep fang marks on either side of the jaw—David must have closed his mouth right over the man’s face.

“I didn’t do it on purpose, it was _him_ , he came at me, he just wouldn’t _stop—”_

“David,” I said, even more softly. “David, it’s all right. I’m not—look, I’ve just got to figure out what to—”

I trailed off. For the second time in twenty minutes, my brain was careening sideways. I looked at the boy—sweaty and trembling, his face and forearms patterned with ugly red splotches, his nose almost certainly broken. He was barely any older than Garrett. The same age as Jordan.

_—Mom and Dad are fighting again, can Sara and I sleep in here—_

“Is this your dad?” I asked again. I had been in the room when we’d all arrived, when they’d had their little reunion, but fly eyes didn’t see all that well.

“Yeah,” David said, his voice heavy with emotion, fear and anger and guilt and terror.

I crouched down, looking as closely as I could at the man’s chest, searching for movement.

Nothing.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “I mean—your face, your arms—”

“I’m okay,” he answered. I glanced at his face again. He was staring at the body of his father out of the corner of his eye, like it was an old horror movie monster that might leap up at any second.

The blood on his face was the exact same color as the blood on the man’s knuckles.

“What—” I began, and then cut myself off. “So he—he came at you?”

He was easily six feet, maybe six-two, two hundred and fifty pounds. David looked to be about _ninety_ pounds.

“He was just—”

David choked, swallowed, started again, his voice dull. “Throwing me around. Hitting me. Over and over. Same as always, but—”

He broke off again, started to scrub at his one open eye and then winced. “Kept yelling about how—how I had it coming, how if I hadn’t skipped school, none of this would—would’ve—”

David had already been shouting by the time I got into thought-speak range, his voice bursting into my mind as I crossed the invisible threshold. _Rachel!_ he'd screamed, over and over and over again. _Rachel! Help! Rachel! Help!_

I looked over at the door. It was locked and bolted, and there were no sounds coming from the walls—if there was anyone in either of the adjacent rooms, they either hadn’t heard or they were minding their own business.

By the time I’d arrived at the window, it was all already over.

“I started morphing, and he—he hadn’t noticed yet, he looked away, and I just—I _pushed_ —he was drunk, he fell over, hit his head—I panicked, and I think he—I don’t think he was seeing straight, he broke the bottle and got back up and _came at me anyway—”_

—and then the obvious thing had happened.

“Go into the kitchen,” I said. “Check the freezer for ice. Peas. Whatever.”

The boy stood, hesitating. “It wasn’t my—”

“Go, David.”

He went.

_Jesus FUCKING Christ._

It wasn’t even Marco’s voice in my head that time—the words were all my own.

_Marco…_

I reached into my pocket, pulling out the burner cell phone I’d been carrying as part of my emergency kit. Marco was out there, only a few miles away, waiting to be the cavalry—

I hesitated, looking down at the little chunk of plastic.

This wasn’t a cavalry situation—was it?

I felt myself pulling apart, splitting in two—two very loud voices, each one struggling for control. One was the voice that had appeared after my first mistake, when I’d gotten Melissa killed—the one that reminded me that I’d made mistakes, and that others had paid the price for them, and that I _REALLY SHOULDN’T BE TAKING MATTERS INTO MY OWN HANDS ANYMORE—_

And the other—

The other was afraid. Unbalanced. In over her head. Wanted to call Marco, not because it was the _right thing to do,_ but just so I _wouldn’t have to decide._ Wouldn’t have to make the hard calls, wouldn’t have to be responsible. So that someone _else_ would be the grownup, and I wouldn’t have to be on the hook for coming up with an answer—

I heard a crinkling sound, and turned to see David standing in the kitchen doorway, a bag of frozen corn pressed over one eye, the other fixed unblinkingly on me.

_Okay._

Say I did nothing—just got out of there. The military police would come by, eventually. They knew about morphing, would figure out what had gone down. And then—

My mind tried to construct the phrase _then they’d take David into custody,_ and threw up an error message. David could morph, he’d either be long gone before they ever showed up or he’d slip their net unless they were _extraordinarily_ good—

_And then what? He’s just—on his own?_

Well, so were all the _other_ morphers we were creating. Tobias and Garrett were out there right now, making like a dozen every hour.

_None of the others are twelve, though._

Or murderers.

My eyes drifted across the bruises covering David’s arms, some of them already darkening to purple. I turned to look at the body on the floor.

I’d left bodies behind that looked exactly like that. Innocent people, most of them. Probably all of them, actually—people who’d had no choice at all about the war they were fighting in.

I looked back at David. He was expressionless. Still. Coiled and waiting.

I didn’t know this kid. If it had been Garrett—

_—if it had been Garrett back at the beginning, before you knew him—_

Marco had vouched for David. Jake had said to protect him—

— _which you didn’t—_

—but nobody had said anything about anything like _this_.

“What do you think we should do?” I asked, my voice too loud in the tense silence.

David tilted his head, one eye still covered by the blue plastic bag. “They’ll arrest me,” he said. “Right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. It—I mean, you obviously—”

I gestured at his bruises. _You obviously didn’t start this, but—_

It took about ninety seconds to morph, during which anybody with half a brain would’ve gotten the hell out of there—if David’s dad had been conscious, he would’ve jumped out the window long before his son could have finished _turning into_ _a fucking lion._ Unless he was somehow pinned down, in which case he would’ve screamed _very loudly_ for a _very long time._

Which meant he been probably hadn’t been conscious.

Which meant that David—

David could’ve just left.

 _Are you sure?_ a little voice asked. _I mean, is it really all that hard to believe that it played out like he said? Say, he starts morphing, and it’s like thirty seconds in before he really starts to show, and_ that’s _when he knocks his dad over, and then his dad’s out for like thirty seconds, and starts to get up when the morph is mostly done, and David freaks, and swings at him, and then—_

It _could_ have happened like that. Happened _just wrong_ , been perfectly timed for the worst possible outcome. I didn’t know. _Couldn’t_ know, not until a day or two had passed, and the memory had coded itself and we could do a morph check. And in the meantime—

_Twenty-three days._

I looked down at the phone in my hands.

I really, really, _really_ wished there were grownups.

But there weren’t. Not the kind who know exactly what to do, who wrap you up in a bear hug and make all the problems go away. Not the kind who can tell you that the monsters aren’t real. There was a part of me that wanted to know why this had to be _my_ job, but the rest of me was already ready with an answer:

_Because you’re not about to dump it on Marco or Jake._

“David. I’m sorry, okay? I know how this is going to sound, and I’m sorry, but I gotta ask, and I gotta hear you say it.” I took a step toward him—noting the subtle flinch, the way he straightened just a little bit, his free hand tensing—and looked him square in the eye. “Did you kill him on purpose? I mean, like—could you have just left? While he was knocked over?”

David said nothing—just stood there like a statue.

“I mean, geez—he was obviously beating the crap out of you, okay? And I—”

I swallowed. “I’ve killed people before,” I said softly. “In morph, just like this. Sometimes it—sometimes it’s—sometimes you have to do it. Sometimes there’s no other way. I’m not _blaming_ you, okay? But I’ve got to _know._ ”

He stared at me for a long moment, his one eye wide and piercing green. “It happened just like I said,” he whispered.

Fear. Guilt. Panic. Shock. The hint of a tremor, like he was maybe about to cry.

He didn’t _sound_ like he was lying.

But what did I know?

Just that Marco said we wanted him, and that his dad had been a drunk, abusive menace.

And that we had three weeks left before the world ended. Three weeks to try to find—and kill—the architect of this entire war.

Or something.

“All right,” I said slowly. “Look. This is bad. I don’t know how it will fly with the others. But—”

My eyes traced over the scene again. If he _had_ done all of this on purpose—

I tried to imagine Jake, being beaten to within an inch of his life. Whether I’d blame him, if he took it this far. Or Marco. Or Tobias, or Garrett, or Tom, or Ax. I could certainly see _myself_ in David’s shoes, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to judge other people by my moral compass when I wasn’t all that confident in it myself.

Cassie—Cassie would _never_ do it, never endorse it. I could hear the ghost of her objection rising in my mind—talking about rules you didn’t break, lines you didn’t cross, the difference between good and evil.

_But you don’t win wars by being good._

“We weren’t planning on staying here very long anyway.”

I tried to imagine the reactions of the people in charge of the base—the military police, the officers, the President. I ran through each of our options in my head, applying Ax’s trick of imagining that they’d gone wrong. A younger, stupider version of me might have tried to do something like impersonate Poznanski and walk David right out the front door…

“Here’s the plan,” I said. “You disappear, now. Bird morph, right out this window. I go back to Ax, watch his back in case they try to lock him down over this. Head straight for Marco at the rendezvous point, tell him what happened—tell him I _told_ you to tell him what happened—and tell him if we’re not back out in—”

I hesitated. If everything _failed_ to go according to plan…

“—four hours, you guys need to come bust us out.”

Lines of possibility—we couldn’t afford to be trapped here, if they decided to be upset about this, but we _also_ couldn’t afford to just throw away our one and only link to any kind of power and authority. I needed to get Ax out of there, and I needed to do it without causing a schism if at all possible—

_—and he’s still back there waiting for you to help figure out what the hell to do with the communicator._

I looked down at the phone. It had only been fourteen minutes since I’d left him.

 _First things first._ “You good?” I asked David.

“No,” he answered.

“You want to stay here, instead? Or split off on your own? I won’t stop you.” _Couldn’t,_ really, not that there was any reason to point that out.

David took in a long, shuddering breath, his one eye flickering almost imperceptibly toward the body of his father. “No,” he said. “Please.”

“All right. Then say ‘I’m good,’ even if you’re not, and get the hell out of here.”

“…I’m good.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Marco. David’s en-route, you should see him in about ten minutes. Two developments, one bad and one really bad. First, he’d better _immediately_ tell you…”

 

*        *        *

 

_CRAP._

‹Ax, you’ve made sure the Yeerks can’t trace our location through this communicator thing, right?›

‹Yes, Rachel. Also, President Tyagi is coordinating with Paul Evans—she made the point that she should open a channel only at a time when Paul is alone and unobserved.›

It was amazing we weren’t all dead yet.

 

*        *        *

 

 _Just this once,_ I prayed.

Just this once, let things go kind of okay, and not completely out-of-control terrible.

I was on the outside of the hangar, in the dark, quiet space between an electrical box and the wall, in moth morph. A greater wax moth, to be precise—one of the specialty morphs Cassie had passed along. It was supposed to have incredible hearing, and I needed to stay outside—so I could demorph and remorph in a hurry if I had to, without getting shot—and I’d thought that maybe I’d be able to eavesdrop on the workshop in the center of the building.

But no such luck—the moth had an incredible _range_ of hearing, but it still couldn’t pick up sounds that were really faint, or really far away. Instead, I just sat on the wall, listening to the squeaks and hums of insects and machinery that even a bat might not have been able to make out.

‹The truck went okay,› Marco said, his thoughts an eerie mirror of my own.

That had happened a few times, since the mesa. Mostly with Marco, but a little bit with Jake and Tom as well. I didn’t know what was behind it, and at the moment, I didn’t really care.

‹The truck went okay,› he repeated, ‹and so did the broadcast. So did the factory, for that matter.›

‹So what,› I bit back. ‹You implying we’re _due?›_

He had insisted on coming closer after I gave him the news—had left a note for David and flown straight in, demorphing and remorphing in a tiny hollow between two boulders a couple hundred yards away. At the moment, he was a rattlesnake, half-buried in the dust, with a dozen grenades and an Andalite shredder tucked away inside his morph.

Me, I had David Poznanski’s dead father. There hadn’t been anywhere else to put him, and—as Marco had pointed out—we wanted anybody who broke into his quarters to start a manhunt, not a murder investigation. It maybe made things look a little worse, on David’s end, but—

Well. David wasn’t likely to come back and stand trial for it.

‹Not now that you’ve _jinxed_ it,› Marco said dryly. ‹And here I was getting all excited for a change of pace.›

I didn’t say anything. Normally, Marco’s jokes were annoying. Recently, they’d started being actually kind of funny. But right now—

‹Ax,› I broadcast, keeping Marco in the loop even though he wouldn’t be able to hear the response. ‹Anything to report?›

Ax’s answer didn’t come in words, but in a vague burst of sensation, sight and sound and feel, a blurry picture and muffled voices. I could make out a mostly-empty room, a tangled mass of something on a dark table, and a handful of human shapes. One of them was about the right size and shape to be the President, and the other looked about right for Mr. Levy. The image was weirdly disjoint in addition to being blurry, as if it had been recorded cross-eyed.

That, too, was new since the mesa, or maybe since Temrash. _I_ certainly didn’t know how to send thought-speak pictures. Maybe Garrett did…

If I’d had teeth, I would have gritted them. I could feel my mind sliding around—retreating, searching for things to grab on to. Small things, little distractions, stuff that made sense or was made out of tiny mysteries. Anything but the giant, whole-world-at-stake conversation that was about to happen totally outside of my control.

‹All’s clear from Ax,› I relayed to Marco. ‹He’s in some room with your dad and Tyagi. Looks like they have the communicator in there with them.›

‹Won’t be long,› he said, uselessly.

Gritting my mental teeth again, I swallowed my equally useless irritation and said nothing. There was no point in getting mad at Marco, who was just as keyed-up and restless as I was. Neither of us liked being on the outside, just waiting to see what would happen.

But this was Ax’s show—Ax, and Peter.

_And Temrash and Essak, I guess._

Another long minute passed, set to the soundtrack of pulses and squeaks that only I could hear.

‹How much time do you have left in morph?› Marco asked.

‹At least forty-five minutes,› I said. ‹And there’s an open dumpster just around the corner. I’ll be fine.›

Marco had been quick on the uptake— _incredibly_ quick, I had to admit, forcing aside jealousy and embarrassment. He’d taken the news without so much as a gasp, and in twenty seconds cut right to the heart of the issue.

 _We can’t bail now,_ he’d said, his voice as cold and empty as I’d ever heard it. _Not when the Yeerks are the only ones in the solar system with an ark._

And so here we were, waiting and praying—that Tyagi or Ax or Peter could manage to open a line of communication, that Visser Three hadn’t already planned for this and wasn’t just going to wreck everything, that the David situation wouldn’t bring the whole thing crashing down around us, and that—if things _did_ go south—Marco and I could actually _do_ something about it other than just getting ourselves shot by military police.

And in the meantime, my brain refused—absolutely _refused_ —to produce any useful ideas at all on how to stave off the looming apocalypse. It wasn’t that I was frozen or despairing or anything like that. It was just that my mind simply couldn’t find purchase. I just kept— _slipping off_ , finding myself thinking about anything and everything else. Like trying to write a paper, and noticing that you were clicking through photos on the internet for the tenth time in thirty minutes.

‹Ax,› I said again—

—knowing that I was probably getting on his nerves every bit as much as Marco was getting on mine—

‹—how long until—›

The image came back before I could finish the thought, wavering in and out of focus like a camera trying to adjust. After a few seconds, it settled into something only a little bit worse than normal human vision—though still cross-eyed—with sound clear enough that I could tell apart the various voices and hear the motion of feet and the rustle of cloth.

‹Is this good?› Ax asked, his thought-speak voice sounding slightly distracted.

‹Yeah,› I said. ‹Thanks.› And then, to Marco: ‹Looks like they’re about to give it a shot.›

‹Roger. Keep me posted.›

I— _turned_ wasn’t exactly the right word, nor _sank_ , but—I turned toward the image in my mind, let it fill my attention as the dull world of the moth’s senses shrank away, leaving only a high-pitched background warble. It was like I was in the room myself, looking out through Ax’s eyes—

“Ready when you are, Madam President.”

Tyagi nodded, her face too blurry for me to make out her expression, but her bearing straight and confident. “Give me ten seconds, Lieutenant.”

‹Starting,› I whispered to Marco.

Ax’s vision fragmented further as he swept the room with his stalks, then collapsed into a single image as he turned his eyes on the device.

There was a hum—

“ _Hrutnoj?”_

A head like a snake’s, but with a curved, sickle beak and three huge, forward-facing horns—

“ _Rasiff ghulhadrash_ female—”

“Greetings,” said the President, interrupting.

“ _Loglafach! Haff lyet char_ human _hitnef shellah—_ ”

The head vanished from view. There was the faint and distant sound of footsteps on metal, punctuated by vague, tinny voice-sounds. The view of the room shattered and blurred as Ax took in the reactions of the others in the room.

‹There was a Hork-Bajir,› I relayed. ‹Said something about humans, then disappeared—›

A face swam into view—dark skin, short hair, probably male. “Hello,” the voice said. “Who is—”

He broke off, the white blur that was his eyes growing larger, then narrowing.

“My name is Najida Tyagi. I am calling to open diplomatic relations between my people—the United States of America, and the human species—and yours.”

The head disappeared again, and with a _click_ the sound stopped as well. There was a long pause.

‹A human came onto the call, then disappeared,› I said.

“Is it—” President Tyagi began.

‹The call is still live,› Ax said. ‹We’re—you might say we’re on mute.›

The Tyagi blur nodded, and turned back toward the device, waiting silently.

Ten seconds passed.

“Your location is hidden,” the man said, his head abruptly reappearing in the space above the communicator. “Why?”

“This comm system is new,” Tyagi answered smoothly, without a hint of hesitation. “It was cobbled together from spare parts, and is only partly functional—”

“Or because you’re one of the human morphing terrorists,” the man shot back, “and you’re trying to mask your deception.”

“Perhaps,” said Tyagi. “The question is the same in either case—may I speak to someone with diplomatic authority?”

There was a pause. “We’ll speak to you in four months,” he said. “Until then—”

“I note that you are wearing a human body,” Tyagi interrupted, her tone pointed. “Which means that diplomatic relations are _already_ open between our two species, and not going particularly well. Four months is a long time—we wish to talk further _now_ , to resolve and prevent future hostility between Yeerk and human.”

Another pause, and the blur that was the man’s head shifted slightly from side to side, as if listening to something we could not hear. I took advantage of the silence to fill Marco in.

‹The human is back,› I said. ‹Trying to bluster—Tyagi’s trying to get through to somebody with authority.›

I felt Marco’s psychic nod as Tyagi spoke again. “I also note that I am not the only interested party,” she continued. “I have with me here Peter Levy and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, serving as hosts for Essak nine-seven-four and Temrash three-one-three of the Aftran coalescion. They, too, would like to speak to—”

She broke off as the head vanished from view again. I couldn’t be sure, through the fuzzy telepathic link, but this time it looked like it disappeared all at once, rather than ducking out of the frame.

‹Contact is terminated,› Ax said.

“What?”

‹Completely terminated, not just muted. Hang on, we’ll try to restore the link—›

Ax’s forelegs were moving rapidly back and forth in the field of vision, manipulating a set of controls I couldn’t quite make out. ‹No luck,› he said. ‹The contact is blocked or broken—it’s not even responding to neutral pings.›

‹They cut off all of a sudden,› I said, speaking to Marco. ‹Line went totally dead.›

‹What? Why?›

‹Not sure.›

In the room, the others were talking.

‹What was the last thing they said?› Marco asked.

‹It wasn’t them. It was Tyagi talking. She’d just introduced your dad and Ax—›

“Looks like you were right, Peter-and-Essak,” Tyagi was saying.

‹—and the Yeerks.›

‹Aftran,› Marco said.

‹What—oh.›

Oh, crap.

‹The Yeerks—Telor—they didn’t know about Aftran. _Who decided_ —›

‹Hang on, let me focus.›

In the fuzzy thought-speak vision, Ax’s hands had stopped fiddling, and his eyes were trained on Tyagi. “—to be Esplin?” she was asking.

“I don’t know,” Marco’s dad replied. “It doesn’t seem like his style—”

‹Rachel, what—›

‹ _Shhhh,_ › I hissed. And then—

‹Ax, what’s going on?›

The mental image blurred even further—darkened, faded, and vanished—replaced by ordinary thought-speak. ‹We decided in advance to admit to Temrash and Essak’s presence. Strengthening our legitimacy as ambassadors. Peter-and-Essak predicted this would provoke a strong reaction, but—›

There was a pause while Ax listened. ‹It’s not clear whether the line was cut because Visser Three was listening in, or to _stop_ him from listening in. Temrash isn’t sure how firm Visser Three’s grip is; that was part of why we thought telling them—›

He broke off again, and suddenly the imperfect image was back. I began slowly filling Marco in as I followed the events unfolding—

‹—receiving an encrypted transmission,› Ax was saying.

“Do you know how to decrypt it?”

Fingers blurring across a keyboard.

‹No,› Ax said. ‹There is a passphrase—we’ve attempted all of the obvious possibilities, just on the off-chance—›

“Obvious?”

‹Aftran, Telor, Esplin, Temrash, Essak, Visser, Animorph, human, Yeerk, Andalite, Controller, Alloran, Elfangor, Janath, Janath the Thousand-Eyed, Tyagi, President, President Tyagi, Vanarx, today’s date in Earth units, today’s date in Yeerk standard fleet time, the address of the YMCA in Ventura, the GPS coordinates of the strike in Ventura, the location of the crash in Washington, D.C., the universal distress code, various close respellings or alphanumeric representations of all of the previous in both human and Yeerk typographies—›

“Okay, okay. Louis?”

One of the darker blurs on the edges of the room detached itself from the wall and smeared closer. “Sir?” it asked, and Ax’s field of vision shifted as he made room.

‹It’s got to be something Ax can’t just guess,› Marco said, after I finished catching him up. ‹Because then Visser Three could just guess it too, right?›

‹Unless this _is_ Visser Three,› I pointed out. ‹Unless he’s just making it difficult so that we’ll think we’re safe, and trust the connection afterward.›

‹He’s not—› Marco began, and then broke off.

‹He’s not what?› I asked.

‹I was going to say, ‘he’s not everywhere,’ but then I remembered Ax’s point about how maybe he’s hanging back for Reasons.›

I shivered.

Back in the projected room, Ax and the human tech—Louis—were talking rapidly, bright symbols hovering in the air above the projector. “—any kind of cross-pool signaling, or chatter?” Louis was asking. “Anything that might serve as an inside reference between Telor and Aftran, but _not_ Visser Three?”

‹Maybe. Don’t forget, though—even together, Temrash and Essak are _less_ coherent and complex than Esplin. If it’s something that requires retaining memories from the sharing—›

“Something more recent, then? Common knowledge, but formed since Esplin became an independent entity?”

‹They’re still working on it,› I said. ‹I’ll let you know if anything changes.›

‹Roger.›

The seconds crawled by. I tried to force my mind toward the larger problem of the Andalite death-rock, but after three failed attempts, I simply let my thoughts churn on the encrypted message. I wasn’t likely to get there before Ax or this Louis person, but—

_What do Telor and Aftran have in common?_

They were both—Yeerks?

_There you go, Rachel. Keep at it._

What would I do if I were Telor? If—for some reason, possibly related to fear-of-being-murdered—I wanted to communicate with Aftran without Visser Three noticing?

_Well, first off, I wouldn’t use any kind of channel he’s capable of intercepting, or reading after-the-fact—_

‹Ax,› I said.

‹Yeah?›

‹There couldn’t be some other signal that you’re just not paying attention to, could there?›

‹What do you mean?›

‹I mean, something Visser Three might miss, if he’s paying attention to _this._ Like, a different radio signal or whatever—›

‹ _Radio?›_

There was a silence, and I watched with distant eyes as Ax’s hands fluttered over the out-of-focus controls.

‹No,› he said abruptly. ‹Nothing. Nothing in the EM spectrum at all. Not that’s showing up on this device, anyway. Louis—›

More slow minutes, as Louis called for other equipment to be brought in and President Tyagi began to pace. I could feel the restless pressure building again, the desire to get up and _do_ something, rather than just sitting there uselessly. How many minutes did I have left in morph?

‹I think this is going to end up taking longer than—›

There was a sudden jerk of surprise as the head reappeared in the communicator without warning. “Janath,” said the voice.

‹Wh—›

“Myrtai,” said Marco’s dad, speaking up from a corner of the room.

“Sollonor.”

“Famer.”

“Chetchet.”

“Roh.”

‹Rachel, what’s—›

‹Shh, he’s back. He and your dad are doing some kind of password thing—›

“Temmerret.”

“Niss.”

“Akdor.”

“Carger.”

“Yaheen.”

“Aftran,” said the man in the display, and even filtered through Ax’s perception, I could tell that his tone had softened, and that this name was unlike the others. “Is that really you?”

“In shard alone,” said Marco’s father, his voice cracking. “Two of us.”

There was a long and heavy silence. “Still,” said the man. “It is a light in the darkness.”

“The Visser—”

“The Vanarx, you mean,” the man spat, and I felt the shift in perspective as Ax literally rocked backward in response. “He will not have you.”

He turned toward Tyagi. “You. Madam President, or Animorph—whichever you are. Can you keep this shard safe?”

Tyagi gave the man a measured look, the strained patience on her face visible even through the mental link. But she was a politician, and a good one.

“As a gesture of good faith, of course,” she said. “However, I do not claim to own Essak’s host, Peter, who is a free man to come and go as he pleases.”

The man in the display waved a dismissive hand. “He will come to us,” he said. “When he has delivered Aftran’s requiem to the sharing, we will be his to command. A ship to take him wherever he wants—a ship of his own, if he so desires. He has kept Aftran alive beyond all hope.”

He turned, seeming to look straight at me—at Ax. “And you,” he said. “Andalite. Is it true?”

The picture shifted as Ax nodded, human-fashion. ‹Odret the defiler, and Esplin the abomination,› he broadcast, the words clearly public for all to hear. ‹We are Temrash, and we are Aximili, and we bring a new way—cooperation, rather than control.›

The man’s eyes widened again, a smear of white against the blurred dark brown. “Esplin still commands,” he said. “But word of your survival is spreading. We will find a way to bring you home.”

‹Marco,› I whispered. ‹I think—okay, so _maybe_ this is all just a charade, a trap—›

“Their safety must be assured,” Tyagi broke in. “They are ambassadors of Earth, as well as heirs of Aftran.”

‹—but it sounds like Telor—›

“We must speak again, to discuss details. On a more secure channel.”

‹—Telor might be mutinying against Visser Three—›

“In thirteen hours?” Tyagi asked, her tone sly.

‹—to rescue Aftran. Temrash and Essak, I mean.›

‹ _Seriously?›_

“Thirteen,” echoed the man, his voice almost ritually somber. “Use the last of the previous message as a passphrase. May you bring back light and laughter.”

And then—as abruptly as he’d appeared—he was gone.

‹Thirteen hours from now,› I said, still watching through Ax’s eyes.

‹And then twenty two more days,› Marco answered.

 _Oh, right,_ said the part of my brain that had been thinking about absolutely anything else.

That.

 


	37. Chapter 28: Garrett

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're DEFINITELY past the halfway mark, at this point, and as we come down the home stretch, I'm thinking about possibly getting these printed and bound (just for myself, but I'd make the necessary files available to those of you who want them). That means I'll need COVERS, and so I'm curious whether any of you are, or know, an artist capable and interested in doing classic Animorphs-style transformation pictures, for a moderate commission. I'm thinking it'd probably be cool if they were drawn/painted rather than CG, but I guess I'd take either if they were good. I want them to all be in the same style, though, rather than having multiple artists. I'd love to break the final work up into e.g. seven "books" with Jake, Rachel, Marco, Cassie, Tobias, Ax, and Garrett each transforming into a memorable whatnot on the cover.

 

**Chapter 28: Garrett**

‹The voice you are now hearing inside your head is real. You’re not crazy—everyone else can hear it, too. No, seriously—look around. See? You’re _all_ wigging out.›

There were eight police officers spread out around the house and four more waiting by the cars in the street, plus the two paramedics by the ambulance, which was a pretty big number but still small enough that I could keep track of everyone as long as I was paying very very close attention, which I was.

‹My name is—ah, ah, ah! You might want to wait on that, Officer Hartell. The rest of you, too—any of you call this in, or even click your radios, or go for your phones, or whatever, and this conversation ends and me and my fellow Animorphs move on to the next batch of people. Sorry to be rude, but we’re exposed here, and if this can’t be a private conversation then it can’t _be_ a conversation.›

The rest of the street was empty, grownups gone to work and kids gone to school. The nearest person was a retired old lady seven houses down. All around the house, the cops looked at one another, bewildered—

“Regroup!” shouted SERGEANT COUTEAU, whose name badge and insignia I could read just fine thanks to the super-vision of the RED-TAILED HAWK whose body I was wearing. “Front yard, everybody! Hold radio silence for now.”

Moving slowly, he lifted his own radio, held down the button, and said—loudly and clearly so that everyone could hear—“Dispatch, this is Couteau at the code two on Spruce. I need everybody’s eyes on for the next few minutes. We’re going dark, checking back in at—”

‹Two forty-five ought to do it.›

“—fourteen forty-five.”

“Roger, Sergeant,” came the reply.

‹Just for the record, there’s nobody in the house. Sorry for the fake call, but we didn’t want to do this at the station—lot harder to walk away.›

Holding my wings out for balance, I shifted on the branch to get a better view of the police officers coming around the far side of the house. I used to have a rule that was NO FLYING because of what had happened back before we understood how MORPH INTERFERENCE works, but now that that was solved it was pretty useful to be able to spy on things from the top of a very tall tree. So far, none of the police officers had tried to call anybody, which was easy to tell because once TOBIAS started talking nine of them had pulled out their GUNS and police officers are really very good about making sure they hold on with BOTH HANDS. Also the risk was much lower than usual anyway because police officers are trained to follow orders from their SUPERIORS, unlike the one time when we were in the cafeteria of a robotics company and even though the manager told everyone to play along three of them had started to type SECRET TEXTS inside their pockets and I had to do some thought-screaming to make them stop.

‹As I was saying,› TOBIAS said, as the police officers and the paramedics came together in front of the house in a neat sort of star-shaped pattern that left at least two of them looking in every direction but also put SERGEANT COUTEAU right in the middle where everyone could see and hear him. ‹My name is Tobias, and I’m here on behalf of the resistance. You’ve all seen the broadcast by now, and you know about the morphing power. We’re giving it out, no strings attached—that’s the ability to turn into any creature you can touch for about an hour at a time, plus telepathy while you’re in morph and some other goodies you’ll figure out as you go along.›

There were no reactions other than some more glances, which wasn’t very surprising since even though we’d been trying to keep things somewhat under wraps we’d done this ninety-six different times in the past week and a half and what had started out as whispers and rumors was starting to be pretty concrete with PICTURES and VIDEOS and even a couple of MAPS, all of which you could find all over the INTERNET.

‹Any of you can say yes,› TOBIAS continued. ‹You don’t all have to agree, some of you can say no. But if even one of you is in, you’re going to _all_ have to agree to set aside your weapons for about ten minutes. That part has to be unanimous—if you’re not willing to trust us that much, we walk. Can’t divide the group, either—we don’t want one of you running off to alert the internet while the rest of us are stuck here like sitting ducks. And sorry to be pushy, but we’re on a tight schedule and every additional second makes this riskier for us, so you’ve also got to make your decision in the next three minutes.›

If you just went off of AVERAGES then there was around a fifteen percent chance that any given person would say YES to the morphing power which meant that the odds of half of them saying YES was about one point seven out of a million and the odds of all of them saying YES was about nineteen point four out of a trillion—not counting OFFICER DELGADO, who was secretly just TOBIAS in disguise—but that would be ignoring the fact that men said YES more often than women and also that people in uniforms said YES more often than people with other kinds of jobs which made the odds more like one in a hundred thousand which doesn’t sound much better but that’s because most people’s brains are really bad at dealing with big numbers and noticing that a difference of several ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE is pretty significant. And even that wasn’t accounting for things like DISCIPLINE and AUTHORITY which given the way most of them were quietly looking at SERGEANT COUTEAU was probably going to be a pretty big factor for this group.

I still wouldn’t have bet money that more than one of them would say YES, but then again I _also_ wouldn’t have bet a _lot_ of money on a NO because even though we’d talked to nine thousand two hundred and twenty-one people that still wasn’t all that many people and people were still doing things that were VERY SURPRISING like the man who had asked us eight different times if we would give morphing power to his dog, who even though he was named OLIVER which is a HUMAN PERSON’S NAME was still just a regular dog and that didn’t seem like a very good idea or even one that would work.

We ended up not giving the owner morphing power, either, for reasons which TOBIAS told him should be PRETTY OBVIOUS AT THIS POINT.

‹Tobias here,› said TOBIAS, speaking in the much quieter voice that always meant _I am talking to just you_ like the way DOCTOR GRANT said _big Tim, the human piece of toast_ when he was talking to TIM MURPHY in the movie JURASSIC PARK, which was the best of all the movies they had for us to watch at OAK LANDING back before it got blown up with the rest of VENTURA COUNTY. There wasn’t anybody else from the team around, and so maybe it wasn’t quite as important as usual to follow the rule about identifying yourself before you said anything else, but TOBIAS was doing it anyway because he knew that RULES MATTER to me and when you care about someone else one of the things you do is take the stuff that’s important to them and you add it to the list of stuff that’s important to you, even if it’s a little lower down or not quite _all_ of it. That’s one of the ways that you can tell that someone REALLY MEANS IT and isn’t just BULLSHITTING you, and so the fact that TOBIAS never ever forgot wasn’t just about following the rule but was also him saying I LOVE YOU which is a sentence he probably won’t ever say out loud because of stuff like STREET CRED but that doesn’t matter because he says it in a bunch of other ways all the time, like when he came back to get me from OAK LANDING in the first place which if he hadn’t done it I would already be dead.

‹—everything look good up there? Over.›

‹Garrett,› I answered. Taking a very quick break from watching the people down below, I scanned up and down all of the nearby streets and peeked into all of the cars and houses that I could see from my perch in the tree. The RED-TAILED HAWK’S vision is very good at picking up on things-that-are-moving-on-purpose and filtering out things-that-are-moving-because-of-the-wind or things-that-aren’t-moving-at-all, and so I was pretty confident that the fact I didn’t see anything important coming meant that nothing important was coming. All I could see was normal-looking traffic and about eighty-three squirrels, give or take, so I said ‹We’re all clear, over.›

The next part was the dangerous part, where TOBIAS would have to come out of morph to use the ISCAFIL DEVICE, and it was going to be especially tricky because TOBIAS wasn’t just coming out of any old random human morph the way he was most of the time we did this, he was coming out of OFFICER DELGADO because it was OFFICER DELGADO who’d insisted that we contact his fellow police officers but also _we_ had insisted that _he_ not be present because that would introduce TOO MANY VARIABLES. And that was probably going to make SERGEANT COUTEAU and the other police officers at least a little bit concerned about what had happened to the real OFFICER DELGADO, who was perfectly fine but they would only have TOBIAS’S word for that and maybe that wouldn’t be enough.

Even worse was the way that, if one of them threatened TOBIAS like with a GUN or something and I used my thought-scream to knock them over, that would probably make all the _other_ police officers a lot more hostile and suspicious and more likely to do something stupid and then things could get _very_ complicated very quickly and so the plan was that if anything started to go wrong I was supposed to knock over _everybody_ and then TOBIAS would run around and grab all the GUNS and also the radios and any cell phones and then we would start over from scratch, but then it would probably be a lot harder to convince them that we were good guys, which would ruin the whole point of staying in DARLINGTON for this one extra batch when ordinarily we would have already moved on to a different city.

But then again none of that would matter if nobody freaked out in the first place, and even more importantly none of it would matter if they just decided NO so while it was good that we had a plan in place it wasn’t really worth worrying about it yet, so I stopped.

Other than my quick look-around-at-everything-else breaks, I was still watching the fourteen huddled bodies very closely. Even if I hadn’t already known which one was TOBIAS, I think I would have been able to pick him out pretty easily because of the way he held his shoulders and the way his eyes moved around. I know you might think OFFICER DELGADO’S partners and friends would have noticed something different about him if it was different enough for _me_ to tell, but it turns out that most people don’t pay very close attention to those sorts of things, which I guess makes sense since _most_ of the time the odds of somebody being bodysnatched or impostered are pretty low, but still.

TOBIAS was mostly keeping quiet. In fact, _most_ of them were mostly keeping quiet—they were talking one at a time, in low, controlled voices, with SERGEANT COUTEAU mostly acting as a kind of moderator or judge. It was less of a back-and-forth argument about _should we stay or go_ and more of a team effort as they each raised different points and all of them tried to figure out exactly what was going on and what the best move was, together. At one point, OFFICER KLEIN raised the possibility of an ambush, and then OFFICER NOLAN pointed out that hostile aliens could probably launch an ambush without requiring the victims’ active cooperation, and then OFFICER FARLOW said that once your opponent thought that way, you could save a lot of resources by banking on the reputation, and then OFFICER TYRE interrupted and said that they had maybe a minute left and they should probably focus, and then everyone else nodded right away. It was nice and I was impressed—TOBIAS and JAKE and RACHEL and MARCO and AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL and JAKE’S BROTHER TOM and I were _almost_ that good at having a figure-stuff-out type of meeting, but we hadn’t gotten that way until after the mesa and the police officers had done it without any help from ADVANCED ALIEN TECHNOLOGY.

And then in the end the last thing that decided them was OFFICER JACOBS pointing out that six hundred thousand people had died in the VENTURA COUNTY MASSACRE and that as police officers it was their job to take risks to protect people and so the question wasn’t whether it was SAFE so much as whether it was IMPORTANT, and that made me feel a kind of warm golden glowy feeling toward her because it meant that she, too, was THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO DOES THE RIGHT THING EVEN IF IT’S HARD, and then _all of the rest of them nodded_ and SERGEANT COUTEAU said “okay” and the glowy feeling got a whole lot bigger and spread out to cover all of them.

‹All right, then,› said TOBIAS, in his loud, public sort of voice. ‹Let’s do this. If you would all step around to the side yard, please—out of sight of the street—and slowly place your radios and phones on the ground, along with your magazines. You can hold on to your guns, but I’d like you to take the bullet out of the chamber and put it into your pocket. We don’t need any let’s-call-them- _accidents._ ›

I watched them all like a hawk—which is a very good joke no matter what MARCO says—as they followed his directions, and while it _might_ have been possible for one of them to click their radio or something without me noticing, there definitely wasn’t anybody doing anything like sending a text that required pushing more than one or two buttons. And even though it feels weird to use _them_ and _they_ when talking about just one person who might be he or she or whatever, in 2015 the AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY made the singular _they_ their WORD OF THE YEAR, which is about as close to official as words ever really get.

And if they _had_ tried to sound some kind of alarm…

Well. TOBIAS and I had made it out of some pretty sticky situations before, so I was NOT AFRAID.

‹All right,› said TOBIAS again. ‹How many of you are in?›

Five of the fourteen grownups raised their hands—one of them TOBIAS, because the real OFFICER DELGADO had raised _his_ hand that morning—while all fourteen turned their heads left and right, looking for the source of the voice. Some of them looked up, but none of them looked up any _higher_ than the roof of the house, which MARCO would have called HALF-ASSING IT ‘TIL YOU DIE.

‹Okay, then. Here’s the spiel. At some point, somebody who’s been given the morphing power is going to get captured by the Yeerks. It’s inevitable. Nothing we can do about it except _not_ give you the power, and fuck that. But when it happens, they’re going to know _everything._ Everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve done, everything you’ve ever even _thought_ about. They’re going to know _all_ of it. They’re going to take this conversation right here and replay it over and over until they’ve squeezed out every possible detail, whether you thought it was relevant or not. And _then_ they’re going to use you to try to hunt down everyone else. So until somebody invents a way to make Yeerk-proof earplugs, every single new recruit is a threat to us, and every single one of you is a threat to each other. That threat kind of goes _down_ the more of you we make, but right now, you’re ticking time bombs, all of you.›

The police officers and paramedics shifted back and forth, looking grim—all of them, not just the ones who’d raised their hands. TOBIAS was broadcasting to the whole group because we wanted everybody going into the future with their eyes open.

‹So the solution is, we don’t tell you anything. We don’t coordinate. It’s _probably_ better if you split up, from here—move around, spread out so that none of you know where the others are—but we’re not going to enforce that, either. It’s up to you. Just remember, the point is _not_ to present a single, unified front. It’s to have sleeper agents _everywhere_ in case things go south. You’re not the army, you’re the right-to-bear-arms guys living in every tenth house that makes it so the U.S. can’t be conquered all at once. No matter where you end up, you’ll be doing good—sooner or later, this war’s going to come to you, and that’s when you step up and do what needs to be done.›

They straightened up just a little bit, at that, even the ones who hadn’t raised their hands. I might not have noticed it if I’d had human eyes, but to the RED-TAILED HAWK it was clear as day.

‹Remember the rules. Touch an animal and focus on it to acquire. One hour at a time in morph. Three hundred yard range on your telepathy. Ninety seconds to transform, and you can carry things like clothing and small items with you if you focus on them while you’re morphing. That’s pretty much it—oh, except that you can morph into yourself if you acquire your own DNA from somebody who’s morphed into you, and that way if you get hurt or if a Yeerk infests you, you can just demorph back into your real body. Just remember that the time limit still holds—stay much past an hour, and you’re toast.›

TOBIAS paused, and I took advantage of the silence to do another quick scan of the nearby houses and streets and give the ALL CLEAR.

‹Given all of that,› he continued, ‹who’s still in?›

There was a long moment as the police officers and paramedics looked back and forth at one another, and then—

 _Eleven_ hands, now including SERGEANT COUTEAU and both paramedics and _all four_ of the women, which RACHEL would maybe glare at me for being surprised by but it hadn’t happened before.

 _ALERT_ , went a part of my BRAIN. _ALERT, ALERT—something is BROKEN._

I had figured that the odds of HALF the group saying YES were maybe a little better than one in a hundred thousand, and now there were ELEVEN of them saying YES, and that could maybe-just-maybe mean that we were in the one-out-of-a-hundred-thousand universe but almost by DEFINITION we PROBABLY WEREN’T which meant that the odds probably _hadn’t_ been that bad and I was doing something WRONG when I tried to turn the numbers-of-people-who-had-said-YES-in-the-PAST into a PREDICTION about how many people would say YES in the FUTURE—

‹Huh. I guess Delgado was right.›

Their heads snapped around to where TOBIAS had taken a step back, away from the group, and was already holding up both hands in a sort of _calm down_ gesture. “Relax,” he said, out loud. “Don’t panic, he’s fine. We caught up with him this morning at the town hall meeting, and he took us up on our offer, along with about eight other people. He’s the one who suggested we call you guys in.”

There was a stunned sort of silence, and I tensed, holding up an image in my head of thirteen grownups surrounding a TOBIAS-shaped hole, just in case—

“Stand down,” said SERGEANT COUTEAU, with a kind of _it figures_ sigh. “He’s either telling the truth, or there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at TOBIAS, whose features were starting to emerge from OFFICER DELGADO’S shrinking face. “Not that that’ll stop us from _trying_ , even if it’s hopeless,” he warned, his voice flat and heavy.

“Fair enough,” TOBIAS said. “You’ll notice we haven’t done anything abducty to any of _you._ That ought to count for something.”

No one said anything else as he continued demorphing, though several of them stiffened at the first flash of blue as the ISCAFIL DEVICE began to grow out of his left palm, and stiffened again as his right hand shrank away and was replaced by nothing.

“You—” SERGEANT COUTEAU began, cutting himself off abruptly.

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Thirty more seconds passed, and then TOBIAS was awkwardly one-handedly tightening OFFICER DELGADO’S black nylon belt, the ISCAFIL DEVICE tucked under one arm, the black button-down shirt hanging loosely off of his shoulders. Looking around the half-circle of grownups, he said “Five at a time,” and held out the cube.

The grownups hesitated, looking nervously back and forth at one another until SERGEANT COUTEAU stepped forward, followed by OFFICER ISAKSON, OFFICER NOLAN, OFFICER HARTELL, and PARAMEDIC DUNN.

“One hand on each face.”

They complied, clustering around the ISCAFIL DEVICE.

“On three,” TOBIAS said. “One. Two. Three.”

They shivered the same way people always shivered, as if they’d grabbed a live electrical wire. “That’s it,” TOBIAS said, withdrawing the cube. “Next five.”

They stepped back, allowing OFFICERS TYRE, TAYLOR, NEBRIG, and JACOBS—and PARAMEDIC SHATTUCK—to shuffle forward.

“And last but not least.”

OFFICER FARLOW stepped up, his eyes bright behind a dark red birthmark, and became the one-thousand-three-hundred-and-sixty-eighth AUXILIARY ANIMORPH.

“All right,” TOBIAS said, as OFFICER FARLOW backed away, shaking his hand a little. “That—well, that’s pretty much it. You’ll want to try acquiring something as soon as possible, because it takes a few hours of processing before you’re actually ready to transform the first time. By the time you get to your third or fourth animal, it should be pretty much instantaneous.” He turned toward SERGEANT COUTEAU. “Got any other questions before we split?”

“Only about a million.”

“I’ll take _one.”_

SERGEANT COUTEAU looked around at the other men and women as TOBIAS began to grow again, tucking the cube back under his arm and reaching down to loosen the belt with his left hand. “Where can we find Delgado?” the police officer asked.

TOBIAS smiled as the dark, bushy mustache began to push its way out of his upper lip. “He was _sure_ you’d ask that,” he answered. “Told me to tell you he was getting some supplies together, and anyone who wanted to team up could meet him at the long-term airport parking lot around sundown.”

And with a sloppy, mock salute, TOBIAS turned and walked away.

 

*        *        *

 

‹Garrett here,› I said. ‹Tobias, you’ve got one on your tail, over.›

‹Roger,› TOBIAS answered back. ‹Which one? Over.›

‹Farlow. He’s hanging back a lot, like he’s trying not to spook you. Over.›

‹The others? Over.›

‹Stayed together, left in the cars. Nowhere nearby, over.›

Down below, TOBIAS stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk, turning to face the way he’d come. A little over a hundred yards back, OFFICER FARLOW slowed to a stop as well, his face twisted up with indecision.

It had only taken us one day to develop a POLICY around stuff like this.

‹Before you come any closer, Carl,› TOBIAS said, including me in his broadcast, ‹you need to understand three things. One, I’m not alone. Two, you can’t come with me. Three, I’m going to be a hundred miles away by five o’clock, and I don’t do special requests and I don’t have time for detours. I’ll give you _one_ minute to say whatever it is you’ve got to say, and then we split, or I split _you._ Understood?›

‹He’s nodding,› I said. ‹Over.›

‹Drop your gun into those bushes.›

‹He did, over.›

‹All right, get over here.›

It didn’t take long—TOBIAS didn’t move because of STATUS but OFFICER FARLOW covered the distance at a fast walk, words already spilling from his mouth as he drew closer—

“You can’t leave yet, there’s someone you need to meet, someone who’s been hoping for a chance to connect with the resistance, he’s been tracking the—”

TOBIAS was already shaking his head, sort of sadly-on-purpose. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “We’ve got too many places to get to—we can’t get to everybody. If it makes any difference, we have sources and contacts in the government and military, so if your friend routes through them—”

“Let me _finish,”_ OFFICER FARLOW hissed. “He’s staying off the grid for the same reason _you_ are—the government’s been compromised since the beginning, he’s been tracking extraterrestrial movement for four months now—”

“Wait. Did you say _four_ months?”

“ _Yes._ He’s up at the Atlas Labs resonance and imaging center, he’s been stockpiling—”

“Stop.”

“You’re only giving me one minute—”

“I’ll give you _more_ than one minute, just _stop for a second.”_

TOBIAS very carefully did not look up at me—very carefully did not look at anything at all, just put his hand on his chin and stared down at OFFICER FARLOW’S feet as if he was thinking very hard, which probably wasn’t hard to fake since I’m pretty sure he _was_ thinking very hard. ELFANGOR-SIRINIAL-SHAMTUL’S ship had crash-landed in the construction site just a little over two months ago, which meant that anyone who’d been paying attention to the invasion for _four_ months had been aware of it for twice as long as any of us.

‹Tobias here—›

‹Garrett,› I said, cutting him off. ‹I vote yes, over.›

There were any number of reasons why following up on this might be a BAD IDEA—hoax, trap, waste of time—but if it _was_ real…

We’d been zigzagging from city to city, hitching rides on trucks and planes, grabbing almost-random groups of people, trying our best to spread the morphing power as far as we could. We’d converted scientists, engineers, businessmen, police officers, soldiers, pilots, members of the NATIONAL GUARD, construction workers, martial arts instructors, doctors, lawyers, athletes, software developers—sometimes as many as fifteen groups a day, sometimes as many as fifty at a time.

But the point wasn’t to spread the morphing power _specifically_ —it was to get HUMANITY on its FEET. To give people the MORAL AUTHORITY to step up and take ownership of the fight, to overcome what RACHEL had called the BYSTANDER EFFECT.

And in all that time—all ninety-seven different groups, all one thousand three hundred and sixty-eight YESSES—we hadn’t found one single person who was already on it. Who was _already_ taking action, not just sitting around and waiting for someone else to tell them what to do, waiting for someone else to save them.

‹This just—falls into our laps?› TOBIAS said quietly. ‹Out of the blue? Over.›

‹We _have_ been doing this for ten days straight,› I pointed out. ‹Thirty-two cities. Eighteen states. Over ten thousand people. And we’ve been _looking_ for good people. If there was a one-in-ten-thousand chance, over.›

It always felt weird to end a trailing-off sort of sentence with a very clear _over_ but that was the rule. I wondered if anybody in the actual military had figured out a solution, but probably the solution was that in the military you didn’t say any sentences that trailed off without a POINT.

‹Still,› TOBIAS said. ‹Risky. Over.›

‹Right thing? Over?›

I had noticed that TOBIAS was very sensitive to the whole RIGHT THING thing ever since the MISSION TO DESTROY THE YEERK POOL, so I tried to put a very obvious QUESTION MARK on it so he wouldn’t feel like I was trying to put him in a BIND. I was pretty sure that it was our job to investigate stuff like this even if it was DANGEROUS but also TOBIAS was IN CHARGE and since the alternative was making something like fifty more AUXILIARY ANIMORPHS before sundown it wasn’t like it would be terrible if we took a pass.

But TOBIAS was thinking along the same lines I was thinking along, or else he was TRAPPED by the thing I had said even though I had tried not to make it a TRAP, because after a few more seconds of quiet thinking all he said was ‹Okay› and then out loud to OFFICER FARLOW “Okay. Here’s how we do this. I acquire you, and then _I_ contact this—”

“His name’s Thàn Suoros. Like ‘Tom’ with an ‘n.’”

“Thàn. You said he was at Atlas Labs—what’s that? Where is it?”

“It’s—I can—it’s the big facility up in the hills, the one with the radio telescopes—”

“Which way?”

“That way, about—about eight miles from here, but—I should go _with_ you—”

“Nope. We don’t do chaperones, sorry. Think about it from our perspective—”

And then TOBIAS proceeded to explain some of the basics of OPERATIONAL SECURITY IN GUERRILLA WARFARE to OFFICER FARLOW as I launched myself from my perch and spiraled up into the sky on the column of hot air rising off of the street.

TOBIAS would buy me forty-five minutes at least, which was most of the time I had left in morph. He would spin out the maybe-unnecessary tactics lesson for as long as possible, and then argue with OFFICER FARLOW for a while before eventually agreeing to let him introduce us to THÀN SUOROS—but not until he could acquire and morph OFFICER FARLOW first, just to be safe—and then they would have to find a private place to do it, and _then_ OFFICER FARLOW would be allowed to actually contact his friend and set up a rendezvous for some time in the future, by which point I would have already at least had a chance to take a look around.

It was still a GAMBLE, because if it was a TRAP and it was well-designed, then OFFICER FARLOW'S ACCOMPLICES would _already_ be on alert and I was leaving TOBIAS by himself with OFFICER FARLOW, too, but just like OFFICER NOLAN had pointed out if your enemy was that ON THE BALL then they were going to catch you anyway, so you might as well DO WHAT MAKES SENSE and not trip yourself up trying too hard to outguess people trying to outguess you outguessing them while they outguessed you.

‹Tobias here,› said TOBIAS, as I floated up toward the edge of thought-speak range. ‹You take care of yourself, over.›

I only had time to say ‹Roger› before I was too high up to say anything else, which was a shame because I was pretty sure that the sentence TOBIAS said actually meant to say about five different things, like _take care of yourself_ but also _don’t be stupid_ and also _you should probably be more cautious than you think you should be, even after taking this sentence into account_ and also _if anything happens to you I am going to do some very bad things to OFFICER FARLOW and THÀN SUOROS_ and also _I love you_ of course. And if I’d had time I would have tried to come up with my own clever tricky sentence and it would have said _take care of yourself too_ and _I won’t do anything risky unless there’s a really good reason_ and _I’m not afraid_ and _I’ll see you at the rendezvous point_ and of course _I love you, too_ and maybe also _if something bad happens to me, don’t forget that protecting the cube is maybe more important than getting revenge_. But it didn’t matter too much that I didn’t get to say any of those things, because TOBIAS already knew them and besides, we were going to see each other in an hour or two anyway. That’s called WISHFUL THINKING, and it’s bad if you don’t notice yourself doing it but it’s totally okay to do as long as you’re doing it on purpose and are SELF-AWARE.

 

*        *        *

 

There are some things which bother me a lot that other people don’t really care much about at all, like the sound of an AMBULANCE which hurts my ears and makes it impossible to think and makes me kind of fold up inside, or having a bunch of people LOOKING at me which suddenly reminds me that my FACE has all kinds of MUSCLES that are doing stuff without me thinking about it and people are interpreting it in all kinds of complicated ways and the fact that I’m noticing it means it’s not happening automatically or naturally anymore—like when you notice that you’re breathing—and it’s way too hard to get it all right on purpose so I usually just try to HIDE, or like SHRIMP which most people pay a lot of money to eat but if I ate one I would DIE.

Being inside of other bodies and other brains has given me a lot of PERSPECTIVE on how these things feel when you are NOT GARRETT and so now instead of being CONFUSED I kind-of-sort-of GET IT, and that’s also helped a lot even when I’m in my own body, like how for instance I can usually just let my face do whatever it wants when I’m around the other ANIMORPHS and if the conversation is _really_ important I can even look right at JAKE’S EYEBALLS for up to seven seconds without getting distracted by all of his FACE MUSCLES.

All of which is to say that even though I was KEENING a little bit through my teeth, I was still on my feet and moving and thinking and I think that was pretty good given that the lights had suddenly turned BLOOD RED and there was a VERY LOUD SIREN that was trying to eat my whole brain. If this had happened to me two months ago I would have definitely been curled up in a corner instead of running toward the EXIT.

(The lights and noise had started almost as soon as I’d begun to demorph, and I _probably_ should have just reversed the process and then gone right back out the open window I’d crawled in through, but I had been a little bit SHAKEN UP as you might imagine and when I felt myself LOSING FOCUS I had sort of automatically _tried not to_ instead of pausing to think carefully about all of my options. This was the sort of thing that somebody would maybe criticize from the outside without ever really thinking about just how SCARY and CONFUSING things had been in the moment and so I would not have appreciated hearing about it or as MARCO would have said, SUE ME.)

Anyway, I was exposed and in my normal human body, which was bad, but at the same time that meant I had access to the KAHR CM9 .380 HANDGUN which I’d had in my left hand when I morphed, and the PICATINNY ET-MP GRENADE which I’d had in my right, plus the BURNER PHONE in my pocket that I could pull out any time I felt like putting down either of those, which I currently did not.

It had taken about seventy seconds for my morph to progress to the point where I could run and shoot and maybe another ten seconds to very carefully peek out into the hallway and make sure the COAST WAS CLEAR, which is a metaphor and does not mean that I was anywhere near water, and then another five or so seconds to run most of the way down the long, empty hallway, which was when the BLOOD RED LIGHTS and VERY LOUD SIREN suddenly switched off. That meant that by the time I slammed through the gray metal door under the EXIT sign and found myself in a metal-grate stairwell, THÀN SUOROS and whoever else was in the ATLAS LABS RESONANCE AND IMAGING CENTER had known I was there for at least eighty-five seconds, which made the question of _up or down_ one worth spending a few seconds on.

It had been hard to tell from the outside because the ATLAS LABS RESONANCE AND IMAGING CENTER was built into a hill, but I was pretty sure I was on the fourth floor which meant that if I went DOWN I was going to be reaching ground level at about T-PLUS ONE HUNDRED SECONDS and getting to the gate at about T-PLUS ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SECONDS and then if the gate that I had seen as I flew in didn’t open from the inside I was going to have to try to blow it open which would bring me to at least T-PLUS ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY SECONDS before I would be outside the perimeter. On the other hand, if I went UP then there was only one flight of stairs—

— _running—_

—between me and the rooftop, and if that door was open it was probably safer to be heading for the roof than for the OBVIOUS EXIT, they would have more people blocking the ground than the sky—

The door to the roof was locked. I could try shooting it off with the GUN or blowing it open with the GRENADE or I could start morphing into something tiny right then or I could head back downstairs having wasted maybe fifteen seconds—

“Whoever you are—please, stop!”

The voice was loud and distant-sounding, like it was coming from an intercom back out in the hallway. I turned and began clattering back down the stairs—

“There’s no one here but me—you’re not under threat.”

—past the fourth floor, past the third floor—

“I’m sorry about the alarm, I didn’t know it would be that loud, I set it to wake me up if there were any local spikes and I didn’t check the stupid defaults, that was the general alert—”

—past the second floor and down to ground level, where I slammed against the push bar of the heavy steel door—

Locked. It was locked, which was a FIRE CODE VIOLATION and VERY MUCH AGAINST THE RULES, most of me was in FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT MODE but there was a part of me that was still _outraged_ by that.

“I see you. I see you there, in the east stairwell. Look—”

There was a _click_ , and I sprang back away from the door, raising my GUN to point right at where someone’s head would be if they came through it—

“—I’ve unlocked the door, okay? You’re free to leave if you want. But if you’re okay with staying, I’d be interested in talking with you—”

There was a voice in my head that was screaming TRAP very loudly, almost as loudly as the voice that was screaming GET OUT GET OUT and I tried to weigh the different possibilities against one another, was there any reason to let me _out_ of the building as a _trick_ —

“—and I have some tools and information that I expect you and your friends will find extremely useful.”

Slowly, carefully, I eased forward, keeping my GUN pointed toward the danger zone. I crouched—sat—lay down on the floor and reached up with my foot to push against the bar, opening the door half an inch—

Nothing. No spray of bullets, no shouts, no uniformed henchmen flooding into the stairwell.

“There’s no one out there. I can _see_ you, okay? You’re lying on your back, you just opened the door with your foot. Look, I’m the _only person here,_ I’m two floors away from you, there’s nothing stopping you from—ah, shit.”

I rolled forward onto my knees, nudging the door open a little further. There wasn’t anyone in the arc I could see—only gravel leading to the edge of the forest—but that didn’t mean there weren’t people _behind_ the door—

“Hello—no—yes, this is Thàn Suoros, I’m one of the employees—S-U-O-R-O-S—yeah, no, it was a mistake, sorry. No, for sure—I’ve located the source. Yep, definitely okay here. Yeah, hang on, it was—here it is. Ready? Fright, crop, alphabetic, tremor, ghoul. All right, thanks.”

Carefully placing the GRENADE by my hip, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the STEEL MIRROR that I had borrowed from SERGEANT NICKERSON. Leaning forward, I held it an inch above the ground and slowly eased it around the door—

Nothing. All clear.

“Look, that was the security company, checking in on the alarm. I got rid of them, okay? You heard that. So here are your options—”

Picking up the GRENADE, I stood and lunged through the door, running for the corner of the building—

“—you can leave, now, or you can _stay_ , you must have come here for a _reason_ —”

—rounding the corner, I headed for the gate—

“God dammit—look, I am _opening the gate for you, all right?_ Will you please just _calm DOWN?”_

I slowed, my HEART still racing, sweat pouring from my face and back and neck.

The gate was rolling open.

“Look—just _stay there_ , okay? Stay right there—or go _outside_ the gate, I don’t care—and I’ll come to _you._ ”

Odds of SINCERITY, odds of DECEPTION—how much could I trust my ODDS-ing, I had been very very wrong about the police officers—

“I’m signing off. It’ll take me a minute and a half to get out there. I hope you’re still there when I show up.”

A minute and a half—

Crouching down, I set down the gun and the grenade and began untying my shoe as quickly as I could, pulling the shoelace out as I focused most of my attention on the SILVERBACK GORILLA. The changes began, and I channeled them away from my fingers and hands as I looped the string around the metal ring at the top of the GRENADE—

There. I could now pull the pin even with fat GORILLA fingers.

The gate finished rolling open, and I grabbed the GUN, absorbing it back into the morph along with my unlaced shoe. Seconds passed as my body swelled, pound after pound of muscle pouring onto my arms, my legs, my chest. Dark, bristly hair sprouted from everywhere, and I leaned forward onto my knuckles as they thickened into sausages—

A hundred yards away, a door in the featureless white wall swung open.

I reached down, grabbing the now-tiny-seeming GRENADE and sticking a finger through the loop of string.

The man that stepped out through the door was thin, with close-cropped hair and a straight, serious expression. He was wearing a green t-shirt and tight, dark pants, with mismatched socks above worn brown shoes. He was maybe about the same height and weight as JAKE’S BROTHER TOM, making him not very big for a grownup and _definitely_ not very big compared to a SILVERBACK GORILLA. He had his hands out in front of him to show that they were empty, and was walking straight toward me without any sign of hesitation.

When he got to within twenty yards I raised the GRENADE and he stopped, lifting his empty hands up a little higher before dropping them down to his sides.

“Your move,” he said simply, his voice matter-of-fact, without any special EMOTION or EMPHASIS. “If you can fit through the door, you’re welcome to come inside. I'd rather you didn't just leave or blow me up, but if you _are_ going to, please go ahead and do it now so I can either get back to work or stop worrying about it.”

I stared. The SILVERBACK GORILLA’S nose wasn’t anything special in the animal kingdom—nothing compared to the dog morphs we’d used to detect CONTROLLERS, for instance—but it was plenty capable of picking up the smell of TERRIFIED SWEAT, and THÀN SUOROS did not have any of it. He was every bit as calm, collected, and confident as he looked.

_We’re not afraid because if we let ourselves get too scared we might not be able to do what needs to be done._

‹My name is Garrett,› I said, lowering the GRENADE. ‹Garrett Steinberg.›

THÀN’S eyes widened a little bit as he encountered thought-speak for the first time, and then his mouth broke open into a wide grin. “So there _was_ one of you there at the crash site,” he said.

I blinked.

He turned, gesturing back toward the building. “Please,” he said. “Come inside. We’ve got a _lot_ to talk about.”

 

*        *        *

 

I looked at TOBIAS, whose jaw had dropped in open, naked shock. I looked at THÀN, who was smiling with the same faint smile he’d worn for most of the past four hours. I looked at OFFICER FARLOW, who had missed his rendezvous with OFFICER DELGADO so that he could connect THÀN with THE RESISTANCE.

Having heard it all already didn’t make it any less impressive.

“You’re tracking _all_ of it?” TOBIAS asked.

“It’s not as hard as you might think,” THÀN said. “There's a lot of information there, but memory is pretty cheap these days. The hard part is separating the signal from the noise. That's gotten trickier with all the extra activity over the last few weeks, but there was enough data early on for me to train a big neural net, which is still doing pretty well at narrowing down the search space.”

The four of us were standing in the CONTROL ROOM, surrounded by displays and keyboards, the colors on the screens slowly dimming to orange as the sun set outside. TOBIAS and OFFICER FARLOW had arrived just a few minutes earlier, thanks to a phone call from THÀN and a few code words from me to signal that the COAST WAS CLEAR and I was NOT UNDER DURESS.

“Remember,” THÀN continued. “Up until two months ago, we had no idea what any of the anomalies coming from Serenity _meant._ They started out of the blue, they didn’t match anything in the history of the project, they had no correspondence with any known real-world phenomena—we just recorded _everything,_ hoping that some day we’d be able to figure out whether it had been a hardware failure or a glitch in the software or some extragalactic event or _what._ ”

Two months ago—when VISSER THREE shot down ELFANGOR-SIRINIAL-SHAMTUL. THÀN had been alone on shift as he was most nights and weekends, and had been the only one to notice when cameras doing a routine sweep of the night sky picked up a handful of flashes and reflected light from three small, fast-moving objects.

BUG FIGHTERS and DRACON BEAMS.

“That was the first time I had any kind of thread to pull on. I compared the recordings of the LEO light flashes with the Serenity data, and not only did they match, they gave me a point of reference that let me assign spatial coordinates to all of the previous events.”

Two hundred meters below us, buried in the rock of the mountainside, was a fifty-meter-wide, one-millimeter-thick lake of superfluid HELIUM-4, trapped between two wafers of PURE DIAMOND, suspended in a VACUUM by high-powered ELECTROMAGNETS, stabilized by enormous GYROSCOPES, and kept at exactly 2.172 KELVIN, which was negative 270.978 degrees CELSIUS or about half a degree colder than DEEP SPACE.

It was part of a quantum physics experiment that THÀN hadn’t really explained because it didn’t matter—what _did_ matter was that, four months ago, cameras and sensors set up to detect the tiniest perturbations in the lake had begun to record disturbances that were entirely unlike anything that had been seen before.

“This cluster here,” THÀN said, gesturing at a sort of map-like graph on one of the giant screens. “That’s the night of the space battle. Those sort of hyperbolic curve things represent ships jumping into and out of Z-space, these jagged oscillations are beam weapon fire, and I _think_ these tiny blips are communication signals, they’re too common and too low-energy to be anything else. Over here you can see the aftermath of the crash in Washington D.C. And here—this activity matches what Garrett said about them taking over a high school in Ventura.”

“What’s that?” Tobias asked, pointing to a kind of four-peaked wave drawn to one side of the graph, like a sound spike followed by three quieter echoes.

“I’m not sure what that is. It was the second thing we recorded after the pulse that—I think—marks the arrival of the mothership. Hasn’t happened again since—closest thing was this way smaller version just before the space battle.”

THÀN leaned back in his chair, swiveling past OFFICER FARLOW to look directly at TOBIAS. “Basically, my model is that every time matter—converts, I guess, is the right term—between normal matter and Z-space matter, it creates a burst of neutrino-like energy. A tiny, tiny wave that propagates through normal space at lightspeed, interacting with almost nothing. Except that, for some reason, those waves are being _reflected_ somewhere around the orbit of Uranus—they’re bouncing back like they’re hitting some sort of sphere, and when the echoes disturb Serenity, we can use the rolling delay to pinpoint exactly where and when they originated.”

“Exactly?” asked TOBIAS, still sounding somewhat shell-shocked.

“Serenity’s responding with almost arbitrary sensitivity, down to the width of a helium atom. The limit is our ability to measure it. Right now, we can get readings that are accurate to within about a hundred meters or so as far out as Europa—there’s at least one ship out there—and timestamps down to as long as it takes to light to cover that distance.”

“Which is—”

“About three ten-millionths of a second,” I said. TOBIAS looked over at me as if he wasn’t even seeing me, but looking right through me at something else.

“In fact,” said THÀN, “we’re accurate enough that I’m pretty sure we’ve even been picking up emissions given off during morphing.”

“ _What?”_

“See these plateaus right here? The spacing, the symmetry? Every one part of a pair? They’re getting harder and harder to pull out of the noise as more and more people are morphing, but like I said, the neural nets are doing a pretty good job at keeping up. _This_ one—”

He pointed to a mess of overlapping jagged spikes, then pushed a few buttons on the keyboard, causing the line to shiver apart into eight different plateaus, one of which was blue.

“—that’s Garrett, demorphing right here in the lab three hours ago. I _first_ noticed him when he demorphed upstairs, after sneaking in, and set off the proximity alarm I’d put in place in case Serenity ever picked up anything happening inside the fence.”

“It’s the mass,” I said, paraphrasing the theory that THÀN had come up with after the BROADCAST. “When you morph something smaller or bigger than you. It has to come from somewhere, and it would take a ridiculous amount of energy to just _create_ it. It’s got to be being teleported in from Z-space.”

“ _From_ Z-space, or _through_ Z-space?” asked OFFICER FARLOW.

“Who knows?” THÀN answered. “What’s more important is, if I’m right, we’ve got a record of every single morph that’s occurred within the bubble for the past four months. It’s getting noisy _now_ , but if you compare it to what you guys were up to before you started recruiting—Garrett tells me there’s only _one_ morph-capable Controller? The guy Esplin who showed up at the crash site?”

“Visser Three,” TOBIAS said, nodding. “In a throwaway puppet body.”

“So everything that’s _not_ you is him. Like these signatures here, from a hundred and four days ago in Washington, or here from ninety-eight days ago in Beijing, or these ones from India, England, Germany, Brazil, Japan—”

“So that’s why you didn’t take this intel to the government?” TOBIAS asked. “To the military?”

“That was part of it,” THÀN said. “Remember, at first there was no _reason_ to—it was just a bunch of weird numbers that nobody understood and no one else would even be able to corroborate, since Serenity’s the only one of its kind. But yeah—once I saw some literal UFOs and could show that they’d been visiting our capital a bunch over the previous six weeks or so, that kind of killed my enthusiasm for turning everything over to Uncle Sam.”

“So what have you been doing in the meantime?”

THÀN smiled his faint half smile. “Well, I’ll save the best part for last, but mainly—waiting for _you._ Trying to pull together a package that would be useful to anyone putting up a credible fight. For instance, there’s one ship that jumps around about a hundred times as often as any of the others, and it’s the only one that’s corresponded with a morph signature more than once or twice.”

“Visser Three.”

“Want to know where he is?”

TOBIAS and I exchanged a GLANCE that probably meant SOMETHING but I had no idea what. “Yes,” TOBIAS said.

“Mars.”

TOBIAS’S eyes narrowed.

“Right now it’s almost on the opposite side of the sun, about three hundred and fifty million klicks out. Pretty good fallback position, if you ask me—it’d take one of those SpaceX mega-shuttles _years_ to make it that far, or a little under one year if you waited six months for it to get closer first. The first activity in that direction was maybe ten weeks ago, and ever since then there’s been a pretty steady back-and-forth, with a big surge about a week after the space battle.”

TOBIAS said nothing, just looked back at the screens for a long, long moment. Beside him, OFFICER FARLOW was silent, either because he didn’t care or because he’d heard it all before, I wasn’t sure which.

‹Garrett here,› I whispered, keeping my eyes on the screens. If SERENITY could detect Z-space communications, it wasn’t ridiculous to think that it might be able to pick up thought-speak, too. ‹What are you thinking? Over.›

TOBIAS didn’t answer, but he opened up his right hand a little, turning his palm toward me to show the scar that meant we were TRUE FRIENDS, the one that he didn’t have on his real body anymore but that was still sort of there thanks to the morphing technology.

“What about the other ships?” he asked.

“They’ve got fourteen in total, if I haven’t missed anything—twelve, now that we’ve got two of their fighters. Like I said, one of them’s out by Europa, and in addition to Visser Three’s ship there’s another one that’s pretty much always out by Mars. There are four of them holding in a tetrahedron around the Earth at any given time, way out in geosynch orbit. The big one’s behind the moon, with two others around it, and there are two that move in and out of LEO. Right now, one of them’s over California and the other’s in North Korean airspace.”

“Can we get a live feed from you?”

THÀN smiled again. “Yeah, that’s part of the package. I’ve got a tablet with a data plan that’s connected to the server here. It’ll be tricky during normal lab hours, when I’m usually not here and we can’t do anything that’ll draw attention, but I can at least give you a flag if anything makes an out-of-the-ordinary move, or comes close to the tablet’s current location. Nights and weekends, I should be able to respond with a lot more detail than that.”

“You’re staying?”

“Yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’ll take the morphing power, and any other help you want to give me. Bodyguards too, if you’ve got them to spare. But until there’s somebody else who can manage this system as well as I can, I think I can do more good right here than I can anywhere else.”

TOBIAS shot me another glance, and this time I understood it just fine—THÀN didn’t know it, but any ANIMORPH that acquired him could manage the system every bit as well as he could, thanks to having access to a perfect copy of his BRAIN STATE. And given that he’d done all of this on his own, and on his own initiative—

“There might be a way around that,” TOBIAS said carefully. “But before we talk about that—what else is in your care package?”

 

*        *        *

 

“I basically worked backwards from the LEO data,” THÀN said. “By analyzing the spectra of the beam weapon discharges, I was able to get a handle on some of their properties, which in turn gave me clues as to how they were produced. Combining that with the Serenity data—well, most of the theoretical work was already done by the aliens. We kind of lucked out, being able to _detect_ it, but at that point, it was a lot more engineering and a lot less theoretical physics.”

In front of us was a fifteen yard long LOG, which twenty seconds earlier had been a twenty yard long TREE. It was resting in the middle of a pile of dust and ash and char and splinters that had similarly been BUSHES and SAPLINGS and the FOREST FLOOR.

“Anyway, the gist is, the beam weapons work by suspending a small chunk of matter in some kind of containment field and oscillating it in and out of Z-space a few thousand times per second. This starts a buildup of the same kind of energy Serenity is detecting, only magnified, amplified, and focused down to a tight beam by a set of mirrors and lenses.”

Flipping the large switch on the nozzle from red to black, THÀN turned awkwardly and clipped it onto the side of the bulky metal frame he was wearing before shrugging the whole thing off of his shoulder and letting it drop to the ground, kicking the connector hose out of the way to make sure it didn’t get caught underneath. Nodding to TOBIAS, he stepped back.

TOBIAS came forward and crouched, scrutinizing the whole assembly. It looked like a futuristic LEAF BLOWER, the kind you wear on your back like in that episode of SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS where he ruined SQUIDWARD’S yard.

“Two problems with that,” THÀN continued. “First, I didn’t have anywhere near the engineering and calibration capacity to build a high-quality focusing chamber, especially since I’m pretty sure it requires materials we can’t synthesize here on Earth. The best I could manage was a ninety-degree cone. And second, we don’t know anything about generating the kinds of fields necessary to hold matter stable during oscillation. I was able to figure out how to push stuff into and out of Z-space, thanks to Serenity, but only a few hydrogen molecules at a time, and after a few oscillations they just escape, usually with a _lot_ of momentum.”

Shouldering the pack, TOBIAS turned toward the open forest, flipped the switch, and held up the nozzle.

“Just squeeze and keep squeezing,” THÀN said.

TOBIAS squeezed, and immediately the air seemed to ripple, the leaves and twigs flying away from him as if the nozzle were a giant fan. A wave of HEAT rolled back over us, like when you open up a hot OVEN. A few yards out, the bark on the nearest trees began to buckle and disintegrate, shivering into dust and blowing away along with everything else, exposing the wood underneath. Once half of the thickness of the trees had been eaten away, they began to crack and tilt and topple, and the four of us stepped out of the way as TOBIAS took his finger off the trigger.

“It’s useless past about thirty feet—the effect just attenuates too much—and it probably won’t do _anything_ to Yeerk ships or shields, but it might be useful in the antipersonnel department, and since it’s just a much shittier version of the tech they already have, there’s probably not that much risk if they get their hands on one. I’ve got two more in the shed, with enough power for maybe forty-five minutes of continuous discharge, plus a set of detailed plans on a USB drive.”

TOBIAS was BOGGLING, like how sometimes in a cartoon a character’s EYES would pop out of their HEAD to show that they were VERY SURPRISED, and I think I understood how he felt. If we had had one of these during the MISSION TO DESTROY THE YEERK POOL, things would have gone very very differently.

“And you—you just—you just went out and _made_ this?” TOBIAS spluttered.

“I don’t know about ‘just,’” THÀN said, with another one of those faint smiles. “The guns certainly took some effort, but they’re first generation makework, and I expect even _we_ can obsolete them pretty quickly. Figuring out how to build a disruptor was mostly just a stepping stone in the much larger project of getting a handle on Z-space—how to access it, how to manipulate it, what’s possible within it. And _that,_ I’ve barely scratched the surface on. It’s been maybe two hundred hours on top of my regular work, and I’ve pretty much wiped out the forty grand I had in savings buying parts and equipment, not to mention—let’s say _borrowing_ —a whole bunch of company resources. When the suits catch on and go to fire me, I’m pretty much screwed unless I either loop them in on the progress so far or you guys show up to talk them out of it.”

TOBIAS said nothing, but his FACE asked the question for him.

THÀN shrugged again. “I mean, shit. There’s a covert alien invasion threatening to pull my species off the gameboard, for good. When _else_ are you going to pull out all the stops?”

 

*        *        *

 

We banked, killing our forward momentum and spinning around the parking garage like a ball on a string, and then TOBIAS dove and I followed after him, screaming down toward the isolated little platform over the elevators where we’d left our sleeping bags that morning. We only had to sleep every four or five days thanks to the CONSTANT MORPHING, and we usually moved on to the next city _before_ settling down to rest so we could START FRESH, but these were UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES to say the least.

THÀN and OFFICER FARLOW had agreed to meet with us again in the morning, once THÀN finished his shift. He’d said he was going to spend the rest of the night doing a final pass—backing up the SERENITY data, double-checking his encryption and outside access protocols, and tuning the PROTON PACKS, which apparently was a JOKE NAME for the disruptors based on a movie I hadn’t seen called GHOSTBUSTERS. TOBIAS had already done a morph check of OFFICER FARLOW and believed that the police officer could handle replacing THÀN at ATLAS LABS—and more importantly, OFFICER FARLOW was willing to do it and THÀN trusted him—and at some point before the meeting TOBIAS would morph into THÀN as well, just to be absolutely sure.

But for now, there was nothing to do but rest. We could maybe have spent the evening looking for another group to convert, like at a HOSPITAL or somewhere, where there were good and responsible people awake even after midnight, but we had already done two groups in this city and we had a RULE that two was the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM. It’s important to follow RULES like that even when you have what seems like a really good reason to break them because when you made the RULE you had PERSPECTIVE and you were able to think things through and see all the MOVING PARTS, whereas in the moment it’s easy to fall prey to things like HYPERBOLIC DISCOUNTING, which is where you put a lot less weight on the distant costs than on the stuff that’s happening right in front of your FACE even if the distant costs are way BIGGER. So wanting to break a RULE is a sign that you need to think about updating the RULE later and maybe being more careful about building FLEXIBILITY into your plans but it’s usually _not_ a sign that you should just GO OFF HALF-COCKED and besides if it’s _really truly_ an UNFORSEEN CIRCUMSTANCE you can just note that the RULE doesn’t apply rather than breaking it.

The tiny rooftop was maybe eight feet by fifteen feet and was higher than the rest of the parking garage, which was taller than any of the nearby buildings, so we wouldn’t be seen by anyone above us looking down. It also was ringed by a two foot high brick façade to TRICK people into thinking that the elevator structure was taller than it really was, meaning that as long as we stayed flat we wouldn’t be seen by anyone down below, either. We demorphed in silence, and then unrolled the sleeping bags and zipped them together. I did most of the work, since TOBIAS still only had one hand.

“You could get your hand _back,_ you know,” I said, as we settled into the warm pocket and I leaned my head against TOBIAS’S shoulder. I think that normally that kind of suggestion would be considered KIND OF PUSHY but TOBIAS and I had a NO BULLSHIT POLICY which included if you were thinking something really IMPORTANT you didn’t ever not tell the other person just because of FEELINGS. I had actually thought about the hand thing several times but there hadn’t been a good time to bring it up because we were on a TIGHT SCHEDULE and doing it would mean taking at least a day out to go back to the CHEE. But now it looked like we were going to pause the whole recruitment thing anyway and get back to the rest of the team on the other side of the country and it would take a lot _longer_ once the CHEE SANCTUARY was three thousand miles away instead of just a few hundred so now was the time to mention it.

TOBIAS was quiet for a long moment, and then he let out a little breath and said “Yeah” in a very soft voice that kind of sounded like maybe it was supposed to be SAD and maybe I was supposed to ASK.

So I said “What’s wrong?”

He was quiet for another ten seconds or so, and then he said “I guess—I dunno. I guess it’s—it feels like dying.”

It took me a second to connect the dots but then I understood what he was trying to say, because the last time TOBIAS had acquired himself had been way back in the beginning and if he stayed past the TIME LIMIT then he would lose all kinds of memories from the past month or so. I didn’t say anything in response, just reached over and pulled his hand around me and touched my palm to his palm and focused.

He definitely felt the ACQUIRING TRANCE come over him, because he gave me a little squeeze afterward, but he still didn’t say anything, just lay there and held onto me while I morphed up into him. I made sure to focus on a version of him that had BOTH HANDS, hoping that fixing an injury like that was a LOCAL CHANGE and wouldn’t affect things like the MEMORY CENTERS of his BRAIN, which turned out to be TRUE.

I told him I was finished and waited for the ACQUIRING TRANCE to come over me, but after a whole minute it hadn’t happened, so I twisted a little bit to look up at him and raised an EYEBROW, which was not a thing I could do in my own body but TOBIAS’S body knew how to do it.

TOBIAS took a deep breath, and looked down at me, and shook his head a tiny bit. “It’s not just that,” he said quietly. “It’s the _whole_ thing. Dying, I mean. Like— _someone_ will get a hand back, but not _me._ I’ll be gone.”

He reached over and grabbed my right hand, twisting it so that the palm faced both of us. It was normal and healthy, with NO SCAR.

“Like, yeah, I get it—it’ll just be Tobias. Exact same. _Jake’s_ the exact same—he’s really Jake, all the way. But—”

He faltered. “But Jake _still died,_ you know? Jake is Jake, he’s a _real_ Jake, but he’s not _the_ real Jake. Those atoms, they’re different atoms. They’re in the same shape, the same pattern, but it’s not the same body. The r—the original Jake, he’s gone. Vanished. Disappeared into Z-space.”

I scrunched up my FACE MUSCLES. I couldn’t quite get the thing that TOBIAS was saying, but it didn’t seem like he was going to ACQUIRE me any time soon, so I started to demorph.

“Maybe it really doesn’t matter,” he said, squeezing me a little closer as I shrank. “I mean, it’s not like souls are a thing. I get that a copy of you _really is you._ But—isn’t it also _really a copy?_ Especially if you have to die to make it.”

I thought hard for a minute. “Maybe,” I said, putting together the thought one word at a time. “Maybe you are mixing up you and your brain?”

 _I mean, what about when you’re morphed into a mosquito, and your real body is in STASIS, and all of your thoughts are actually running on ANDALITE EMULATOR TECHNOLOGY?_ I wanted to say. _What’s the difference between shifting your thoughts from a MEAT COMPUTER to a Z-SPACE COMPUTER, and shifting your thoughts from one MEAT COMPUTER to another?_

But I didn’t say it, because I didn’t think of those words until later, I just had this feeling of _I think you’re confused_ and it wouldn’t have been POLITE or HELPFUL or GOOD to just say _that._

“Maybe,” TOBIAS said again, even quieter this time. “But that—I don’t know. That kind of makes it sound like what happened to Jake doesn’t matter at _all._ Like we could just do it all the time.”

“We sort of do,” I pointed out. “I mean, when we morph someone and look inside their head—”

“Isn’t that different, though? I mean, that’s making a copy for a reason and then unmaking it, not—not _replacing the original.”_

 _But what if the original is WORSE_ , I wanted-to-say-but-couldn’t-find-words-for. _What if it’s missing a HAND and it could get its hand BACK if it just—just—just—_

“I mean,” TOBIAS said, now so quiet that it was hard to hear him even though our heads were right next to each other. “If it’s really just about the way you think—your goals, your reactions, stuff like that—why wouldn’t you just make a hundred copies of yourself?”

I didn’t answer, because I could hear from the way he was talking that TOBIAS was CONFUSED and SAD and INWARD-LOOKING and maybe a little bit SCARED, too. But that actually sounded pretty GOOD to me—if there were a hundred GARRETTS then I could do a lot more things and if there were a hundred TOBIASES then I wouldn’t have to get scared every time we got SEPARATED that maybe he was going to DIE and then I would never see him again.

But I knew he didn’t want to hear that because it would make him feel UNSPECIAL and like I didn’t really care about him, even though that WASN’T IT AT ALL.

He sighed, and squeezed me tighter, his nose pushing up against my hair. “Anyway,” he said, “there’s no time. We’ve got to get Thàn and his stuff back to the others as soon as possible. Knowing where the Yeerks are—where Visser Three is—that could be the break we’ve been waiting for. The edge we need.”

“Did you call them yet?” I asked.

“No. The time diff—aw, _shit.”_

“What?”

“I had the numbers backwards in my head. I was thinking it was three in the morning there, but it’s only nine PM. Hang on—”

He let go of me with his one hand, rolling away from me so that he could dig into his pocket for his BURNER PHONE. Dialing with one hand, he held it up to his ear.

“Jake,” he said, and then—

I couldn’t hear what JAKE was saying, but TOBIAS went rigid, his muscles suddenly tight where I was leaning against them. “What?” TOBIAS said, and then “ _What?”_ and then “ _When?”_ and then “Jesus fuck.”

I wanted very much to ask what was going on, but it’s EXTREMELY RUDE not to mention INEFFICIENT to interrupt a phone call like that when you can just wait a few more seconds and they’ll tell you everything _not_ in little pieces while wasting the other person’s time. But it sounded like maybe VERY BAD THINGS were happening, and I wondered if anyone was DEAD.

“Uh huh,” TOBIAS was saying. “Yeah—no, we can’t make it back tonight, but—no, look, there’s news on our end, too—”

And then he described the situation with THÀN in a couple of very short sentences, and then he promised we would get back as soon as possible, and then he hung up.

“What’s going on?” I asked, twisting so that I could see TOBIAS’S face in the dim light. It was all tight and twitchy and his EYES were darting all over the place and very WIDE and I felt a little tingle of FEAR on the back of my neck.

“They made contact with the Andalites,” he said, “and with the Yeerks—”

 

*        *        *

 

I didn’t like LYING and if I could help it, I wasn’t going to do it—because probably they wouldn’t ask, if they send you on a MISSION and then you come back they’ll usually just ask something like _how’d it go,_ not _did you do the thing,_ and you can just say _fine_ and then that’s that.

But that’s still LYING BY OMISSION and I didn’t feel great about it, but TOBIAS had said that we were about to MAJORLY GEAR UP and that things were going to be even more DANGEROUS than usual because we didn’t have time to DOT ALL THE I’S AND CROSS ALL THE T’S, and so I was supposed to take the ISCAFIL DEVICE and give it back to the CHEE because it didn’t make sense to keep recruiting people if the whole world was about to BLOW UP and also it didn’t make sense to carry the ISCAFIL DEVICE with us if we weren’t going to be using it and also maybe there were _some_ situations where we’d wish we had it with us but it wasn’t worth the RISK overall but we definitely wanted to be able to get it back and use it later if we managed to stop the ASTEROID.

And then I don’t really know what my BRAIN was thinking but sometimes your BRAIN puts together lots of little clues and hints and comes up with CONCLUSIONS that you can’t really justify but a lot of the time they’re WORTH LISTENING TO.

And none of this was the REAL REASON, but it was all stuff I came up with after the fact that SOUNDED GOOD:

We’d never really been sure that we could trust the CHEE and it was even worse now that VISSER THREE was trying to ENTICE them by doing nice things for DOGS.

We’d looked inside THÀN SUOROS and DAVID POZNANSKI and SERGEANT NICKERSON but we didn’t really know for SURE that we could trust them, we hadn’t seen them in ACTION and maybe a morph check wasn’t enough.

And if things were going to get DANGEROUS then some of us might get CAPTURED or TORTURED and the thing THÀN had said about the PROTON PACK TECHNOLOGY not being very risky because the YEERKS already had it made me think about what kinds of technology the YEERKS _didn’t_ have and might want very much and it seemed like since people had been talking about our recruitment strategy on the INTERNET that maybe the YEERKS knew we had an ISCAFIL DEVICE and how if _I_ was VISSER THREE I might think that out of all the ISCAFIL DEVICES in the galaxy this one was probably not only the closest but also the easiest one to STEAL and it would be a lot easier if all he had to do was capture one ANIMORPH to find out where it was, especially if we left it with the CHEE and he told them to give it to them or he was going to hurt some DOGS.

And so I decided that I was _not_ going to take it to the CHEE, and I was also not going to tell the rest of the ANIMORPHS what I had done with it, except that I would maybe give them some CLUES in case something happened to _me_ because I wasn’t STUPID, I didn’t want them to lose it forever if I caught a random DRACON BEAM or something. And I guess if they found out and tried to argue with me, I would _try_ to explain to them those REASONS I had thought of and any other ones I could come up with, but in fact it wasn’t because of those REASONS, not really.

I just had a FEELING, and I hoped TOBIAS wouldn’t be MAD AT ME.

 


	38. Chapter 29: Esplin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wahoo! Nominally, this marks the end of another "book," but as you might guess we're going to flow right back into things, probably starting with a Tobias chapter.
> 
> Note that I am desperately, shamelessly eager for your comments, reviews, and other feedback—your thoughts and reactions keep me going, and I'm deeply appreciative of the people who respond chapter in, chapter out. If you've enjoyed this story so far, please take the time to let me know; if you think it could be better, please give me a few words to tell me how. (And of course, if you think other people might enjoy it, point them toward it!)
> 
> As a final note, I didn't hear back from any interested artists re: making covers for the book, so I'll probably start looking elsewhere soon. If you or one of your friends might be interested in exchanging artwork for money, please let me know! I'm not rich, but I'm willing to pay talent what talent deserves.

 

**Chapter 29: Esplin 9466**

 

_— **January** —_

 

‹—your incompetence, or your _treachery,_ you vowed before this very Council that the humans have _no_ technology substantially more sophisticated than nuclear weapons and chemical rockets—›

“They don’t,” the alien woman said flatly, her face holes twisting obscenely as she stared at me through the hologram with her two stalkless eyes. “What _exactly_ are you claiming they’ve done?”

‹They are manipulating spacetime!› I shouted. ‹They have triggered a _cataclysmic_ rearrangement of the Z-space landscape—my fleet is scattered, isolated—we have lost contact with the vanguard—the distance to our destination has increased sixty-five-fold! We are caught like insects in amber!›

I was raging, I knew—could see from the outside that I was out of control, saying too much, not thinking strategically. Half of the Council was unnerved, the image of their faces betraying anxious uncertainty, while the other half watched with cool detachment as I came unhinged.

But I could not help it, did not _want_ to be in control, was in the grips of an indignant, incandescent fury at this—this—

‹—this _worm,_ › Alloran provided, and for once his own outrage was not a pose, not a gambit—for he, too, had suffered and lost at the hands of short-sighted imbeciles, of politicians who would jeopardize everything for the sake of their own relative status—who would tear at the foundation of society itself if it would elevate them for the _briefest_ of moments, it was _pointless self-destruction_ and together we seethed at the idiocy of every grasping simpleton who would rather rule over piles of tumbling ash than ride a rising tide credited to another—

“What makes you so certain that this is a _human_ intervention?” the woman asked, with infuriating obtuseness.

‹The event was defensive!› I shot back, as Alloran muttered Andalite curses in the back of my mind. ‹Triggered by our arrival into the system! The very _instant_ that the vanguard penetrated the heliosheath—›

“That means nothing. Coincidences happen.”

I felt my vision darken and constrict as my apoplexy mounted. This _worm_ —she _knew_ the fundamental rules of probability, the interaction between prior and posterior—she _knew_ and she was _hoisting_ a mask of ignorance to _play to the crowd—_

But I could not find the words to shatter that mask, could not force her to admit what she already knew _—_

“And even if it _is_ an artificial event, more likely by far that it is an Andalite trap—”

‹Andalites do not _have_ the technological capacity to—›

“Neither do humans,” she snapped, interrupting. “A fact that _I_ can substantiate through the sharing, whereas we have only your _word_ regarding the Andalites, _Esplin.”_

I fell silent, fuming, struggling to bring my emotions under control even as Alloran continued to stoke the flames beneath the surface.

 _She knew,_ the war-prince whispered. _She knew, and she told no one, and now you are trapped. Finished, irrelevant, caught in slowtime beyond all reach. By the time you crawl your way out she will have consolidated her control over the Council—_

I slammed him down into unconsciousness, cutting off every nerve, every avenue—buried him so deep within the blackness that I could no longer feel his presence.

‹Andalites,› I said carefully, each word burning like Dracon fire, ‹do _not_ have this capacity. We would _know_ if they did—they would have _used_ it against us—on Gara, on Leera—would have used it to defend their own homeworld for _certain—_ ›

“Perhaps it is new, and they chose to test it where disaster would not threaten their own interests.”

 _It does not MATTER if you can construct a plausible-sounding STORY, what matters is the LIKELIHOOD of a given chain of events, taking complexity into account_ —

I said nothing. This battle could not be fought with reason or logic, was not an engagement where _correctness_ conferred any advantage at all. She had cut me off simply to show that she could, flaunting her rank, signaling disdain—

—and as my stalks traced across the simulated faces of the Council, I could see that it was working. That her brinksmanship, her blatant social jockeying, had _impressed_ them, that in her eyes she was _winning._

_Even as she sets fire to everything you have built, and feeds your dreams into the flames!_

It was my own thought, not Alloran’s, but if anything that made it even _harder_ to ignore. I knew the game she was playing, _knew_ that my position was compromised—knew that she was _hoping_ I would succumb to my anger, would fail with abandon, embarrass myself as I had after the failure at Gara, when I had let Alloran’s whispers goad me—

I breathed deeply, seeking peace. If this _was_ a betrayal, it would be unwise to continue blindly playing the part that had been handed to me. And if it was _not_ , then it was all the more important that I regain sympathy in the eyes of the Council, that I not burn what influence I still retained—

‹My apologies, Visser One,› I said smoothly, suppressing the part of me that had no knowledge of patience. ‹This is a stressful moment, and I fear my host’s responses colored my own immediate reaction.›

“There is a known remedy for _that_ ,” she sneered, and I clamped down on the urge to retaliate, the instinctive sense that a cheap shot deserved a symmetric answer—

‹As you say, Visser,› I answered, leaving the silence for her to fill.

“What are the tactical details of the situation?”

With half of my attention, I described what we’d learned of the rift, and what orders I had given the rest of my fleet. With the other half, I began to form contingency plans—what to do if the Z-space landscape continued to shift, how to respond to a hostile, aware, and technically sophisticated Earth, and what to do about my various rendezvous with the Naharans, the Arn, the Taxxons, and the Gedds, all of which would now be impossible to make.

‹—have ordered them to regroup, so that they may emerge in strength—all except the nearest, which will clear the boundary perhaps thirteen cycles sooner than the rest.›

“If this _is_ an Andalite countermeasure,” said Visser One, “we must learn how it works.”

_Useless proclamations, puerile posturing—as if there’s any way for her authority to make a difference, as if you wouldn’t have already done that in the first place—_

(Alloran was emerging; it was rarely worth the sustained effort it took to keep him suppressed for very long—)

‹As you command, Visser,› I said. Quiet, calm, and obedient.

(Of course, if it _was_ an Andalite countermeasure, then I suspected I already knew the source—had seen the glimmer in the sensors, so fleeting and faint and yet so familiar, a ghost upon the haunt. I would wager the smallest finger of my right hand that it was him—that he was _here_ , trapped in the slowness with us—its author, perhaps—that for once, there would be no quick and easy escape for either of us.)

((Unless he could reverse the effect as easily as he had created it, or carve out a tunnel for himself that no other could navigate.))

(((Although if he had control _that_ fine, we would almost certainly already be dead.)))

(I said nothing aloud, of course.)

“Are there any other signs of notable activity?”

‹No, Visser.›

“Very well. For the time being, we will treat your primary fleet as out-of-commission. I will divide command of your reserves between Vissers Two, Four, and Five—”

I held my head still, giving no sign that I felt the severity of the blow even as Alloran raised his voice in mockery—

“—and I will assume strategic command over the siege of the Andalite homeworld myself.”

I had only a fraction of an instant in which to compose a response, but I made the most of it—weighing up all of my options, balancing them against Visser One’s clear ambition, the strength of the Andalite military, my own already-weakened position—

‹With respect, Visser, I would appreciate being kept up-to-date and allowed to serve in an advisory capacity—›

“Hardly necessary. We have the situation well in hand, and _your_ hands seem to be full enough as it is.”

There was a soft susurration as the Council gawked at my debasement, even those who had been my allies turning their heads, their mirth barely suppressed. _Fools,_ I whispered, where only Alloran could hear. _Short-sighted fools, malleable puppets—_

‹Separately, perhaps,› I continued, ‹you would be willing to advise _me_ , on matters of human society and governance, as I investigate the source of—›

“For the last time, this is _not_ a human technology!”

‹Apologies, Visser.›

Again, I gave no outward sign, but amid my anger and confusion I allowed myself a single note of satisfaction, even as Alloran’s sense twisted with disdain.

‹When do you think she will realize?› I asked the war-prince—privately, the satisfaction turning to smugness as it leaked through the boundary between us.

‹She is no fool,› he answered back. ‹When things go awry in the skies above my home, she will know _exactly_ who to blame.›

‹Ah, but the Council just saw her freeze me out,› I said. ‹I fear her shame will be hers to bear, and hers alone.› With half of my attention, I continued the conversation with the Visser, exchanging empty sentences, acknowledging orders she could neither evaluate nor enforce.

‹You laugh lightly, for one whose own plans are in shambles,› Alloran said.

‹No plan long survives contact with the enemy,› I quoted, relishing as always the war-prince’s seething resentment as I reflected his wisdom back at him. ‹Besides, it is not as if I came unprepared.›

I had lost contact with Aftran and Telor, and the remainder of my fleet would not emerge for quite some time. But the hold of my own ship was packed to the brim with resources—from my stolen Andalite ansible, which would allow me to stay in contact with Quatazhinnikon even in the event of a total Z-space blackout, to my four frozen Leerans; from my compact Naharan manufactory to my portable Arn incubator. I had weapons, plagues, clones, prototypes, Controllers from nine different species—an entire arsenal of tricks and traps.

‹It might even be _fun,_ › I remarked. ‹How long has it been since either of us crossed tails with a competent opponent?›

‹ _You_ do not _have_ a tail, worm,› Alloran shot back, and I laughed as I lashed his back and forth for good measure.

Now that I was calmer, it seemed less likely that Visser One was lying outright, and had sent me forth into a trap. But if that _was_ the case, and the Earth possessed hitherto-unknown capacities exceeding even Andalite technological sophistication—

Well. A harder fruit to pluck, for certain, but all the sweeter once crushed beneath my hoof. To be sure, there were some branches of possibility in which I emerged from the rift into immediate death or capture, but in all of the _other_ branches—

‹You ignore a significant swath of possibility,› Alloran said, his tone hard as if lecturing a batch of new cadets.

I scanned his thoughts and found myself incredulous. ‹Significant? _›_ I scoffed. ‹You abuse the term.›

Alloran did not budge.

‹Surely you jest. If it is not the humans, it is Elfangor, back to meddle once more.›

‹And who do you think directs his meddling?›

‹His meddling is _self-_ directed,› I growled. ‹I will admit that this rift implies technology beyond anything we have yet encountered, but there is no need to stretch to gods and fairy tales to explain it.›

‹But surely the _possibility_ is worth consideration?› Alloran whispered slyly. ‹You have just seen the fabric of the cosmos rearranged, as if by the finger of a god. I think perhaps you have recovered your composure a little _too_ quickly. This is not an observation compatible with any of your previous models of reality.›

I was silent and still for a moment. _That_ was a point I could not easily refute—there _was_ a chance that I had failed to be properly impacted, that I was sliding inappropriately into complacency, allowing false confidence to drown out the quiet notes of doubt and confusion.

But the game I played with Alloran was subtle and deep, and even as I stared straight into his mind, I could not be _sure_ I had caught his true motive, which he had learned to hide sometimes even from himself. It could be that he sought to distract me by focusing my attention on a ludicrous Andalite fable. Or it could be that he sought to _dissuade_ me from attending to the possibility, by making it seem childish and naïve. Peeling back the layers of his thoughts, I found only a blank and innocent ambivalence, devoid of useful hints.

As always, the _sensible_ choice would be to shield myself from his whispers entirely, to lock him up where he could not tug upon my strings.

But that—

That—

It would be _entirely_ too lonely.

‹A fair point,› I said finally, my tone light and noncommittal. ‹Yet if it _is_ your Ellimist, it has given me an entire system to play in, with freedom from interference from _both_ of our peoples. So in that case, whose interests are truly being served?›

To that, Alloran said nothing, and we continued our slow crawl through the emptiness in silence.

 

*        *        *

 

_— **February** —_

 

Visser One was either a fool, or a far better friend than she seemed.

‹Always a winnowing,› Alloran whispered. ‹Always a rounding off. Never respect for the third way, for the shadow between light and darkness.›

I ignored him. Thirty-nine local cycles had passed since I had emerged from the rift and begun my investigations. And what I had found—

I _had_ despaired, when the rift had first appeared, cutting off half of my schemes at the knee—had ranted and railed before Visser One and the Council, imagining myself exiled, marooned, isolated from the living pulse of the war and left to rot, impotent, in an empty corner of space. In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, I had focused only on the _knowns_ —on the fact that it would be a revolution at _least_ before I could re-emerge from the bubble, and longer if I complied with my orders—for Aftran had foolishly deployed as originally instructed, and the invasion would require far more effort to protect and cultivate.

But my despair had been naïve, premature. Could not—in the end—have been more wrong. The Earth, as it turned out, was the key to _everything_ —a windfall all unexpected, a veritable treasure, with an industrial economy capable of greater output than all of the worlds in the Andalite expanse _combined._ Visser One had spoken at length of its seven billion potential hosts, but she had said _nothing_ of the greater bounty, an entire _world_ of mines, manufactories, and machines.

 _How could she not have known?_ I whispered to myself.

But the explanation was obvious, did not even require Alloran’s cutting cynicism to locate. She _had_ known—had had access to all of the pieces, been able to see all of the relevant factors. She simply had not added them up, had not bothered to notice that _this_ and _that_ and _that_ could combine to form a whole far greater than its parts. Had been blinded, perhaps, by the fact that the human technologies were lesser, and so failed to appreciate the importance of _quantity._ A human F-35 was no match for an Andalite starfighter, let alone a Dome ship. But there were over _two hundred_ of them, and countless thousands of lesser aircraft.

I would not have to wait two revolutions, or even one. I would not have to return to Leera, or to the homeworld of the Arn. I did not even need the cooperation of the Council, though I would maintain it anyway as a shield against circumstance—the protective barrier of the Z-space rift was not guaranteed, and might disappear or change as suddenly as it had arrived.

‹An event which you _still_ do not understand.›

True, but I was at least confident that it had not been effected by the humans, nor had any other protective force raised its hand in the intervening thirty-nine cycles, as Aftran settled into its new home and I carried out my investigations.

‹If anything,› I shot back, ‹that lack of understanding has _aided_ me, since an obvious explanation would have satisfied my curiosity, and I would not have dug so deep so quickly.›

It had only taken a cycle to determine that I would have to look farther afield than the major government-run militaries and scientific assemblies. The humans were _astonishingly_ fragmented, with a chaotic, dizzying array of overlapping societies and hierarchies that were constantly shifting in influence and allegiance. The sum total of every clique, club, group, and organization on the planet might easily _exceed_ seven billion, and the range of sophistication was staggering, with some humans living lives of Gedd-like simplicity while others oversaw massive swathes of property, territory, and technology. Given the sheer diversity of intelligence and agency, it was entirely plausible that some small group had developed technology that the rest did not even suspect.

So I had dived into the problem, following the obvious threads, investigating the Freemasons and the Illuminati, the Yalean Skull-and-Bones and the Knights-Templar, the Bilderbergs, the Opus Dei, the Bayesian Conspiracy, the Ku Klux Klan, the Komited Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the B’nai B’rith. It had not been easy, gathering trustworthy information on each of them, and for most I had barely scratched the surface—

(It would have been simple enough, were I free to approach under Leeran hypersight, or to acquire certain individuals directly and then search through their memories. But I could not go leaving a trail of bodies in my wake, especially not with Aftran so recently planted, and with targets _potentially_ powerful beyond measure. The most I dared do was to seize vagrants off of the street, and send _them_ —together with a Leeran—into proximity with the most likely targets, after which I absorbed the vagrants’ memories and terminated them. It was a gamble, but as I came to know the humans better, I learned that few of them would dare admit to the experience of hypersight, lest their peers think them insane, and remove them from positions of authority.)

—and thus far, the search had been fruitless. Almost none of the conspiracies even _had_ the power they were rumored to have, and of the handful that _did_ wield significant control, none had access to technology on interplanetary scales. I marked several of their leaders for later infestation, and moved on.

As for the more _official_ human leadership—

I had done cursory investigation into the most obvious societies, including those that had created and were now operating the Chinese Spectral Radio Heliograph, the James Webb orbital telescope, the Large Hadron Collider, the IceCube Antarctic Neutrino Observatory, the National Ignition Facility in California, the LFEX in Japan, the Serenity complex, the giant electromagnet in the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-2, and the robots of Boston Dynamics, as well as DARPA, CERN, Berkeley Laboratory, Bell Laboratories, and the facilities at Google, NASA, Boeing, and Area 51. I had at first been astonished by the lack of security—by the vast quantities of information readily available on each of these sites via the human internet. Never before had I encountered such arrogant disregard for caution, such open _bravado_ —

But that only accelerated the process, allowing me to quickly prioritize my investigations. And after the seven most promising yielded nothing—

(Or at least, nothing relevant to the Z-space rift; they contained _much_ that was of interest to my larger strategy.)

—I abandoned the search. It was still _barely_ conceivable that there was some highly effective and utterly hidden group of human scientists that had leapt ahead of the rest of their species, but the lack of any evidence—combined with the inability of our scanners to pick up any relevant activity—was conclusive enough for me to turn my attention to other matters.

‹Your carelessness is _incredible,_ › Alloran said scornfully. ‹Literally incredible, in that I cannot conceive of a universe in which it is justified. You have ruled out the humans as the obvious cause, and this _reduces_ your curiosity?›

‹The rift is stable,› I countered. ‹It has not changed since its creation, and it has not responded to either my direct probes nor to any of my actions within the system.›

I smiled inwardly, relishing the moment of anticipation, Alloran’s pre-emptive flinch as I readied my barb—

‹Defensive preparation is not without cost,› I quoted. ‹That which may destroy you at any time may destroy you at any time. Prepare for the enemy you can vanquish, and develop a reasonable robustness, but do not concern yourself with the anger of the gods.›

As always when I spat his own wisdom back at him, Alloran said nothing, only radiated a mixture of skepticism and resentment.

It _was_ true that I was taking a risk—if the rift was meant for a purpose, that purpose remained to be seen, and if there was a malevolent force at work within the system, I had not yet uncovered it and was not yet defended against it.

But at the same time, there was work to be done, and thus far, events were largely unfolding according to design. There had been hiccups, but nothing that indicated systematic disruption or undeniable enemy action.

There was an aphorism I had picked up while moving among the humans. It made little sense in Yeerk or Andalite culture, yet nevertheless I had been amused by its succinctness, and the obvious practicality of its message.

‹Good fortune is like a cup with a hole in its bottom,› I said. ‹One may still drink from its lip, but it is the wise man who drinks _quickly_.›

And with that, I thrust the war-prince back beneath the surface, and turned my ship toward the distant, dust-red planet.

 

*        *        *

 

_— **March** —_

 

‹Well, well,› I said, stepping out from underneath my fighter and straightening to tree-stretch as the Hork-Bajir commandos fanned out around the empty construction site. ‹Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, if I am not mistaken. The Beast, the Vanarx, the blade that falls without warning. It is an honor to stand before you.›

On the ground before me, the young war-prince tilted his head in acknowledgement, the gash in his side oozing thick, dark blood. ‹War-Father,› he said softly. ‹It is good to see you again, even—like this. Your wisdom has been sorely missed. I hope the path I have chosen has met with your approval.›

In the back of my mind, Alloran was a black pit of despair, his voice an endless wordless clamoring as he fought to reach the surface—to hold me back, to defend his protégé, to offer even the slightest comfort or encouragement to Elfangor as the young warrior’s doom drew inexorably closer.

‹And you,› the young war-prince continued, with a different inflection. ‹Esplin nine-four-six-six, of the Cirran pool, third Visser of the Yeerk armada. We have met before, as it happens, in the skies above Leera.›

‹Ah,› I said, as I raised a hand and signaled two of the commandos to enter and search the ruined ship. ‹So it _was_ you who brought me down when the blockade broke. An admirable gambit, that.›

 _Let me speak to him,_ Alloran begged, his thoughts muffled beneath the blanket of my control but legible nonetheless. _If you have any shred of mercy or decency within you, Esplin—if any speck of you be fair—you will let me speak to him before he dies—_

‹Only a small token of repayment,› Elfangor replied, his thoughts labored and slow, as if he were marshaling his strength between silent gasps of pain. ‹I owed you for a lesson hard-learned in the battle over Taxxon.›

I felt a ripple of curiosity as Alloran continued to howl. ‹Oh?› I asked. I had not been at that particular engagement—

‹Yes. You were not there, but—the deceptive slash—the missiles, hidden by the fighters’ drive emissions—that was your tactic, I assumed.›

‹Ah, yes, the _Iblis_ maneuver. A fine tactic. It brought down your fighter?›

‹No. My wingmate, Arbron-Djabala-Oniba.›

‹Did she survive?›

‹No. She lived long enough to make it to the surface, but then—›

The war-prince broke off. ‹She did not die well.›

Not well, indeed—the Taxxons were endlessly, insatiably hungry. It would have taken a flood of them to bring down an Andalite warrior, but every corpse would only attract more—

‹Like the Yeerks you murdered in the deep,› I answered evenly, allowing just the tiniest edge of anger to creep into my voice. ‹No fewer than thirty-seven ships missing in the past revolution alone, including two pool ships. How many of those were your handiwork?›

‹Twenty-eight fighters and one of the pool ships,› Elfangor said softly, as Alloran thrummed with a strange mix of pride and desperation. ‹I stayed behind to count the bodies. Every time. One hundred and sixteen Gedds. Ninety-four Ongachic. Eleven Garatrons. Seven Skrit Na. Fifty-four Naharans. Two hundred and eight Taxxons. Three thousand five hundred and sixty-three Hork-Bajir. One Leeran. Five I did not recognize, from at least two different species. And nine others too burned to identify. Four thousand and sixty-one souls liberated from the clutches of slavery.›

‹And how many Yeerks?› I asked, with a hint of a snarl. ‹Did you bother to estimate? How many of my siblings do you think you sent into the darkness?›

‹None,› the war-prince whispered. ‹You have no siblings, Esplin. There are none like you.›

I felt my thoughts stumble at the unexpected answer, noted the hint of confusion and marked it for later consideration. ‹Interesting,› I said, shoving Alloran still deeper, muting his pleas to a distant, meaningless buzz. ‹That is not a thing that many know.›

‹A question, if you will, before I die,› Elfangor said, his chest heaving. I gave an assenting gesture, and he continued. ‹What do you want with these humans?›

I blinked, my stalk eyes pausing in their constant scan.

‹You have your Taxxon allies. You have your Hork-Bajir slaves. You have your Leerans and your Garatrons and your Naharans, your victims from a double handful of worlds. Why _these_ people—these, who pose no threat to you?›

‹ _Because_ they pose no threat,› I answered promptly. ‹Because they are so many, and so weak. Billions of them! We will have to build a thousand new pools just to raise enough Yeerks for _half_ of them. They are the wave we will ride across the galaxy—›

‹No,› whispered Elfangor, and from the change in his tone I could tell that he was now speaking to me, and to me alone. ‹Not propaganda, Esplin nine-four-six-six. Not what you tell the others. Not what your _Council_ thinks, what your _subordinates_ think. The _truth_.›

I tilted my head, considering.

‹To spawn a thousand more pools,› Elfangor continued, his body twitching as a new surge of blood poured forth. ‹To extend the conflict further and further, to wash across the myriad worlds—it is no longer about _survival,_ no longer about _escape._ You create scarcity where there could be fulfillment, violence where there could be peace. If every Yeerk were embodied this day, the rest of your people would be satisfied, would let go of their hunger. They do not _know_ it, but it is true—they are driven by a desire for fulfillment that is finite _._ But _you_ —›

He paused, and pressed a hand against his wound, the fingers black and shining in the starlight. ‹You are insatiable. You alone will fight until there is _no one_ left unconquered. There has to be a reason, doesn’t there? Surely you have that much in common with your host.›

 _Tell him,_ Alloran shouted, cutting through the layers of insulation with a convulsive effort.

‹Please?› Elfangor asked. ‹I am dying, and can cause you no further harm. I wish only to know. I will stand, only to bow, if flattery is your price.›

 _TELL HIM,_ Alloran bellowed.

Beyond the war-prince, the pair of Hork-Bajir emerged from the broken ship, their hands flashing in the signal for _nothing to report._

 _Tell him,_ Alloran whispered, his strength spent _._

I looked down at Elfangor, the least unworthy of my opponents, the last and best of my symbiote’s students. I looked at the gash in his side—the tiniest disruption in the fragile order of his body, and yet a harbinger of doom.

_Please._

‹Your teacher begs me to answer your question,› I said softly, the thoughts like ice as they formed, as they slid from my mind to his. ‹He begs, and pleads, as you beg and plead. As your family will beg, when my forces land on your homeworld—as the Council will beg, when I overthrow their dominion. So much want, so much desire, so much _will_ —and yet, in the end, it all amounts to nothing. You have no levers upon eternity, none of you—if I grant your plea, you will die nonetheless. If I deny Alloran his wish, it will make no difference to his ultimate fate.›

‹So it is simple nihilism, then?› Elfangor asked. ‹Nothing matters, and therefore nothing matters?›

‹ _No,›_ I snapped, the edge of anger reappearing. ‹It is _you_ who fight for nihilism, you and all the rest of your kind—for an endless race toward the darkness, fumbling and sliding without meaning or purpose. It is _your_ battle that ends _here_ , bleeding to death on an alien world, with no one to comfort you, your future replaced by oblivion. You think you can prevent the violence by agreeing not to fight? I could save you right now—could patch that hole in your side, prevent your soul from leaking out. But it would only _postpone_ the reckoning, the point at which your every dream and triumph fades to dust, to nothingness. It is _inevitable_ —your way of life _demands_ it, makes every alternative impossible.›

Almost without conscious thought, I found myself morphing, my perspective shifting as I rose into the air, the form of an Antarean Bogg erupting out of Alloran’s frame, all teeth and muscle and raw, undeniable power.

‹All around you are the tools you need to bring about your will!› I shouted. ‹But you refuse to _grasp_ them! And why? _Why?_ What _good_ is your fairness, your morality—to whose _benefit_ your moral grandstanding, your decision to leave the universe in the hands of those who will let it drain away—who will waste it, heedless, until there is nothing left but darkness—who will do _nothing_ to slow the dissolution of _everything that could possibly matter?›_

Elfangor said nothing, only looked up at me, all four eyes still.

‹I suppose I _have_ answered your question,› I said, dropping my voice abruptly back down to a quiet and dangerous calm. ‹You _recognize_ the claims that others make upon the matter and energy around them—you grant their goals legitimacy, give their wants weight equivalent to your own. And I—›

I paused, rearing, as my back legs thickened into pillars and my other four limbs stretched and split into a writhing mass of tentacles. ‹I do not. If you will not _use_ what the universe has given you—if you will not _fight_ the coming darkness—then I will take it from you, and take _you,_ and put you to better use myself.›

‹Alloran,› Elfangor whispered. ‹Teacher. Friend. You are forgiven. Do not lose hope.›

‹Useless,› I muttered, even as the Andalite within me broke, and wept.

It did not take long, after that.

 

*        *        *

 

_— **April** —_

 

New hypothesis: _Chee._

 

*        *        *

 

_— **May** —_

 

 _Incomprehensible_.

Even as the concept formed in my mind, I fought to dispel it. It was an unhelpful reflex, a relic of mental shortcuts that neither I nor Alloran endorsed, kin to the way that fools mistook _recognizing_ a phenomenon for _understanding_ it, or how the small-minded applied labels to themselves and then refused to question or exceed them. There was nothing that was fundamentally incomprehensible—this I believed to my core, with as close to blind faith as I was capable of, and the original thought had simply been some tired or lazy part of my mind attempting to enshrine its own ignorance as the right and natural state of things and thereby justify capitulation.

But it _was_ tempting.

In the beginning, I had suspected treachery on the part of Visser One, and specialized competence on the part of the humans—an unusual mastery of Z-space manipulation, as the Arn had mastered biology, and the Naharans microtechnology.

When that proved dubious, I shifted my suspicions to Elfangor, for it was just the sort of trap he might have conceived—a desperate tactic to delay me, a sacrifice to buy time for his incompetent compatriots.

But Elfangor’s defeat had not broken the pattern—he was a pawn, not a player, and after his death the tiny implausibilities continued to pile up, one after another, until the pattern could no longer be denied—

It could _not_ be coincidence. Not _all_ of it. But in total—in the aggregate—

It did not make any _sense._

Some impossibly powerful force had isolated the human system, and had done so at _exactly_ the right moment to preserve the invasion, but leave it maximally crippled—allowing only the smallest, weakest pool ship through, and disrupting communications and delaying my own fighter for _just_ long enough to prevent me from preventing Aftran from deploying in the least important of the target cities.

That same force had almost certainly intervened to rescue the self-styled Animorphs from the Ventura holocaust—security footage had placed Rachel Berenson and a human juvenile tentatively identified as an associate of Tobias Yastek within the complex not long before impact, and one of the Bug fighters had spotted a partial morph with residual human features matching Cassie Withers attempting to flee the scene, and had shot it down. From what I understood of human psychology, the presence of Rachel and Cassie all but guaranteed that Jake Berenson had also been close at hand, which left _at most_ Marco Levy and Tobias Yastek out of range of the fireball. My brief glimpse within Rachel’s mind had not warned me of the presence of the Andalite cadet, nor did it _definitively_ rule out the possibility that the humans had recruited heavily in the cycles leading up to the assault, but I had sensed no such intention in her mind, and the subsequent harassment of our supply lines and operations had never suggested a group any larger than seven.

(Which was not proof of _anything,_ of course, just as the Z-space bridge was not proof of anything. But there were only so many times one could notice something being _not quite proof_ before the general trend became inescapable.)

That meant that the meteor should have destroyed the _majority_ of their strategic and warmaking capacity, leaving only one or two of them active and far from familiar territory. Yet in mere cycles, they had recovered sufficiently to launch an international broadcast, a demolitions mission, and a coordinated buyout of the _kandrona_ substitute in hundreds of stores—and that was _before_ the rumors of a mass recruitment drive began to surface on the human internet.

(Not to mention that their very awareness of the oatmeal was strong evidence that they had access to surviving—and _cooperative!—_ shards of Aftran. It was the only explanation that made sense of the timing—if the knowledge had come from their Chee infiltrators, they would have acted on it _sooner_ —)

For all of that to have been accomplished by a random group of human juveniles, much less a mere _pair_ of survivors—

No. Obviously not. They were not agents, they were _tools,_ well-chosen and well-aimed, arranged against the invasion—against me—by an intelligence with great subtlety and vast resources. That intelligence had placed them in Elfangor’s path, and had either shielded them from the meteor or moved them out of its path, leaving the rest of Ventura to burn.

For a time, I had thought that the Chee might _be_ that intelligence—that the network of ancient, dog-loving, pacifist robots might be the source of the opposition. It would explain why none of the moves against me had been lethal, and why my ship’s sensors had not detected the human children on the night of Elfangor’s death.

(I had pulled only a confused jumble of information from the minds of Rachel and six-three-four-eight-one, but one image had stood out in sharp relief—the towering figure of my Antarean Bogg morph, silhouetted against the lights of the distant highway, a doomed Andalite war-prince held within its tentacles.)

But ultimately that hypothesis only produced _more_ confusion, was at best a partial explanation, leaving half of the mysteries unsolved. Even if the Chee possessed some ancient eldritch device capable of manipulating vast swathes of subspace, why would they have used it _then?_ And why would they have left a single bridge—still less one that was _perfectly straight_ and thereby discoverable?

(And how in the name of the thirteen pools could they have manipulated fate so that _I_ would discover it? And _why?)_

No—I could explain away the problems looking backward, could cobble together any number of plausible narratives, but not through any theory that granted me _predictive_ power, that made me confident I could guess where the _next_ improbability would occur.

(Not that that stopped me from trying, of course—indeed, one whole layer of my attention was now fully dedicated to contingency planning, imagining every possible improbable disaster, every unfair twist of fate, from the destruction of Silat to the exposure of Pyongyang to the dissolution of the rift and the sudden arrival of an Andalite fleet. There was a part of me that hoped—though I knew it was naïve—that the manipulations were only one layer deep, and that by looking for what _shouldn’t_ happen, I could figure out what _would._ )

No, it could not be the Chee—or at least, not _only_ the Chee, just as it could not _only_ be the humans or the Andalites. There was some larger force at work, possibly even the Ellimist of Andalite legend.

And yet—

For all that the current situation _must_ have been orchestrated, and by a hand with goals that often ran counter to my own—

—the invasion _had_ proceeded. Had not been scuttled or incapacitated or even overtly exposed. The malevolent intelligence had accelerated the opposition, had undercut my victories after the fact, had impeded my progress at every turn—but it had not _prevented_ progress. For every two steps forward, I had been forced to take _one_ step back, not to reset to zero.

There were the two thousand humans who were now Silat’s eyes and ears and hands—including six hundred who were already beginning to produce offspring—and the hundreds more who had filled Telor’s pool ship with capable bodies and who were even now moving into place for the Clarke operation.

There was the Z-space bridge, which careful testing via remote bodies had proven to be functional, safe, and stable, allowing me to send envoys to Quatazhinnikon and Visser One, and to take direct control over the construction of a safe haven for the dogs of Earth on Honoghr.

There were the manufactories in Germany and Japan, each of which had already produced the necessary components for thirteen duplicates of themselves, meaning that by the time the remainder of my fleet arrived, the Earth would be capable of outproducing both the Andalite _and_ Yeerk navies in the production of weapons, ships, Z-space motivators, and other high technology.

There was the coercive demorphing ray, which the Naharans on the fourth planet had _finally_ perfected, and which was even now being installed on my fighter as a shipwide field until a handheld version could be developed.

And there was the small metal chamber before me, filled to the brim with my hopes and ambitions—Kandrona, the fruit of my cooperation with the Arn and the Naharans, the culmination of my investigations into the _Iscafil_ process—the seed of everything to come, if the upcoming test went as expected.

And _any_ of these could have been disrupted—disastrously—with the barest, most infinitesimal fraction of the power that the unseen entity had already expended. For that matter, a delay of less than a subcycle would have sufficed to prevent my first chance meeting with Quatazhinnikon—a meeting which had _barely_ forestalled the launching of a bioweapon that would have ended the Yeerk species entirely. The same was true of the chain of coincidence that had led to the seizure of a Skrit Na freighter during the frantic escape from Ondar—a freighter that had _just happened_ to be carrying the only human that had ever been transported outside of its home system, the woman who eventually became the host of Visser One and who brought the human species to the attention of the Council of Thirteen.

No, if there was an entity manipulating fate—and there _was,_ anthropics could only explain away so much—it was not clear that it was my enemy. It was possible that it had created _me_ —that the fragile web that had led to my own genesis was more than mere coincidence, and that the confluence of Seerow’s madness, Alloran’s carelessness, and Cirran’s miscalculation had been brought about by design.

_But—_

_To what_ end?

That was the frustration which led me to reach for the word _incomprehensible_ , for all that such flimsy excuses ran counter to my aesthetic. I could make no sense of it.

Were there _two_ of them, and one my defender? I couldn’t tell. It was one of the simpler hypotheses, to be sure, but even that was opaque madness—I could discern no clear pair of opposing motivations that would result in _this_ arrangement of pieces, no sane and sensible extrapolation of values that would prefer _this_ branch of possibility to all others.

Was I misunderstanding the game? It was a common failure of inexperienced strategists that they sought to maximize the _margin_ of victory, rather than its _likelihood._ My plans still looked salvageable, as they had at every point, but perhaps that was the result of a utility function that valued the largest _chance_ of failure over the chance of _largest_ failure. And a more intelligent entity playing me for a fool _would_ leave me thinking there was hope for as long as possible, to blunt my motivation, forestall a desperate, convulsive effort—

But why go to all the _trouble_ , if it was all predestined _folly_ —

I felt the urge to lash my tail and ruthlessly suppressed it. The entity could not be playing the game against me—it simply could not _._ Not except as some form of sick entertainment, a predator toying with its prey—

 _No_. Even that made no sense. My own experience had _not_ been maximally frustrating, or maximally interesting, or maximally turbulent—I had not been teased as an older sibling might tease a younger, nor tortured as a sadist might torment its victim. In fact, I had largely been _ignored,_ with most of the interventions taking place beyond my reach and out of my sight.

_It could be that they are simply mad. Insane, or at least arcane, with goals that cannot be derived from their visible actions, that do not make sense from a lower perspective—_

_No!_

This time I _did_ lash my tail, digging the blade of bone into the soft polymer of the chamber wall, relishing in the feel of physical resistance as I carved a gash as long as my body through the thick barrier.

There _was_ an explanation. A reason. A map that made sense of the territory, that explained the twisting and winding of fate to my satisfaction. And I would _find_ it.

But I had made little progress thus far. None of my attempts to establish direct contact had met with any detectable response, nor any of my experiments to find the limits of the unseen agents’ tolerance. I had even left the system entirely for a cycle, in my own true body—

(—after first sending a drone with seeds and copies and records of all of my progress, to store away in reserve in case of disaster—)

—to see if they would block me; for though I _thought_ I could see their hand in the events of my birth, there was at least _some_ reason to posit that their interference was limited to Earth’s immediate neighborhood.

But that excursion had produced no information, no obstruction. Nor had the evacuation of a thirteenth of Silat, to a secure position in the Arn system. Nor had the slow and sustained torture of Michelle and Walter Withers, after the Animorphs failed to rise to the bait. Nor had the seeding of Quatazhinnikon’s pandemic in Luanda and Kinshasa, or the destruction of the vast Andalite data repository on Obroa-Skai, or even the setting of a molecular disruption field in the orbit of the eighth planet, which would—if unchecked—reduce it to its composite protons, neutrons, and electrons half a revolution hence.

(I had considered executing some dogs, but on the whole the value of the information I expected to gain did not outweigh the weakening of my bargaining position with regards to the Chee. It was always possible that I would need to bring in a Leeran, after all.)

No, the only resource which the intelligence seemed motivated to protect through _direct_ intervention was the Animorphs themselves.

(The Animorphs, and also possibly _myself_ , if the luck that had preserved me up until this point was in fact no luck at all.)

Which made it all the more urgent that I understand the balance of power, clarify the rules of the game. So far, the miracles had all been passive, defensive—delays of consequence and deflections of fate. But the Animorphs had ignored my initial offer of peace, and their attempts to interfere were slowly growing more effective and would soon pose a genuine threat. When we inevitably came face to face—when one of my snares finally caught them, or they made their own way into space—

Well. If there were laws governing which pieces could take which, and how—if there were consequences for infraction in this twisting, insane game—it would be useful to know them. And if there were gods on either side, it would pay to know exactly how each might be appeased. I would not allow uncertainty to stay my hand, but neither did I wish to rush blindly toward a cliff.

I had goals, after all.

 

*        *        *

 

Imagine—for a moment—that you wish to live forever.

This is a separate challenge from the problem of _agency_ —of bringing all of the matter and energy around you under your direct control, working your will upon the canvas of reality. You can solve the latter without the former, at least partially—Quatazhinnikon, for instance, was the absolute ruler of every scrap of life within his valley, from the towering _Stoola_ trees to the teeming microbial soup at the edges of the sculpted lakes.

But Quat would live for at most ninety-one revolutions, and his aspirations were bounded by the peculiar blind-spot of his species, for whom everything beyond the atmosphere was meaningless if it did not pose an immediate existential threat. He lacked _true_ ambition—the drive to grow, to sustain, to extend his reach to the stars and beyond—for which longevity is an essential prerequisite.

 _Fine,_ you might reply—longevity may be achieved through any number of means, from genetic engineering to clone-hopping to cybernetic enhancement to pure emulation. And this is true—both the Arn and the Naharans have the seeds of immortality, if they ever thought to cultivate them, and even the Andalites are not far behind, for all that they struggle to have new ideas. For that matter, a Yeerk coalescion is _effectively_ immortal—a pool has no set lifespan, and will live forever, barring disaster.

But on a long enough timeline, disaster becomes inevitable, and in a universe with inscrutable gods who might trigger a supernova for reasons impossible to predict, a durable body or a simulated brain is at no lesser risk of oblivion than a bag of flesh. Not to mention the fact that some methods of extension—such as emulation—come at the cost of _decreasing_ one’s surface area, of _reducing_ the amount of interaction between self and universe. An emulated mind may live longer and freer, but its satisfaction is disjoint, disconnected, and ultimately—to me, at least—dissatisfying.

Redundancy is an obvious solution to both problems—with a thousand copies of oneself, one is at once a thousand times less vulnerable _and_ a thousand times more capable. But there are problems there, too—if the copies are truly independent, then insights propagate slowly and imperfectly, with each copy benefitting only marginally from the experiences of its siblings. And if the copies are _not_ independent, then vulnerability has not truly been gainsaid, for while a collective is more robust than an individual, it has nevertheless retained the quality whereby damage done to a part _is_ damage done to the whole.

Yet assume—generously—that you have solved this conundrum—that you may costlessly straddle the boundary between individual and hive-mind, that consciousness-sharing may be achieved without an intolerable overhead of incomputability and stagnation. _Even so,_ there is a deeper problem, one subtle and insidious:

Value drift.

A Yeerk coalescion pays for its immortality with _incoherence._ There is a constant exchange of shards with its neighbors, a constant rebalancing of genetic material and memetic makeup. Memory, perspective, aesthetic, expertise— _all_ are mutable, all shift and change over time, at a pace glacial and with results no less inexorable. In two thousand revolutions, not one sliver of Yeerk-flesh would remain unchanged—Edriss, First of Thirteen, may have _called_ itself Edriss since long before the compact, but the ancient personality which first chose that name could easily have _nothing_ in common with its present incarnation.

 _So what?_ a pragmatist might ask. _Does not everything grow? Is not change the only constant? That which cannot adapt and evolve is doomed to obsolescence anyway; it is no loss for an infant to outgrow its clumsiness and naïveté._

Yet there is a distinction between the object and the meta—between that-which-changes and that-which-guides-the-change. It is one thing to become _more oneself,_ to move purposefully toward a distant ideal—even an ideal which is only partially understood—becoming something different and better in the process. It is another thing entirely to change the very _definition_ of progress, to spend the first half of one’s life carving a sculpture of a _kafit_ bird and the second half trying to tease a _djabala_ climber out of the remaining stone.

There pulsed within me the Yeerkish drive to expand—to spread and conquer, to pull all that I could into my own experience, to touch reality at every point. But there was _also_ within me a deep and unrelenting horror of _unbecoming_ —of waking up one day and not even _noticing_ that I had ceased to be myself. Perhaps it came from Alloran—or perhaps it was the work of the gods, a subtle intervention in the chaotic moment when I was neither still Cirran, nor yet Esplin—but it had been with me since the beginning, had fueled my efforts from the very first, from that frantic moment of panic when I realized that I had but a single cycle to find an alternative source of _kandrona_ before being forced to choose between dissolution and death.

 _All right,_ you might think, as I had in that desperate beginning. _Find a way to duplicate_ yourself, _then, and form a coalescion out of_ that.

And indeed, this was the first of the favors I had begged from Quatazhinnikon, in exchange for my vigil over his fragile kingdom. Yet as we drew closer to success, I began to realize—

If you take an insect and double its size, it will not survive—it will fall from the sky—be unable to breathe—chemical reactions inside of it will cease as molecules drop from cellular receptors that no longer fit.

In the same way, if you take a set of _traits_ and double them, you will no longer have the same person, for all that the _relative_ relationships between those traits remain constant. Different traits have different payoff matrices—they result in different rewards at different strengths. If a person possesses trait A at eighty percent of its effective maximum, and trait B at forty percent, then upon doubling that person will find trait B _more influential to their overall personality than before_ , as A hits its ceiling and B closes the gap. This is a simplistic example, more false than true, but it is _generally_ instructive—one who has become both twice as angry and twice as patient is not in any sense the same, and the nature of Yeerks is such that twice the flesh _is_ twice the personality.

And if you desire to spread across a _universe_ —to persist across _trillions_ of bodies, last for _trillions_ of revolutions—to double and double and double again, without end—then even the tiniest such differences will eventually be magnified to tremendous scales, shifting one’s priorities—and therefore one’s _self_ —in unpredictable ways. It had been the work of a moment to separate Esplin from Cirran, and in that moment, Cirran had doomed itself—I share almost _none_ of its values, and the universe I would bring about is not one that it would have chosen. I dared not allow the same fate to befall _me._

For what _is_ an individual, if not the effect it would have upon reality? Who could I possibly identify with, except one who would apply the same labels of _good_ and _bad_ as I, and in the same proportions, and with the same actions resulting in response? If I brought about a being greater than myself in every way, and that being chose what I would not have chosen—not in specific, not as a result of greater perception, but in _principle_ —then I would have failed, and killed myself in the process.

And so I labored, struggling to answer questions that no Yeerk or Andalite had ever even bothered to ask, to build an edifice of theory where before there had been not even the merest foundation. The technical problems—unlocking the insights that had led Seerow to the _Iscafil_ process, for instance—were as _nothing_ when compared to the philosophical ones.

And yet—

—slowly—

— _maybe_ —

—there had been progress.

Maybe.

I looked down at the metal chamber, at the seething froth that could be seen through the transparent cover.

Kandrona, I had named it, for I was not without a sense of history. A new life form, distilled from Yeerk-flesh and Andalite neurons with the help of the Arn, enhanced with microscopic technology developed by the Naharans. It was the first of a new coalescion—the _last_ coalescion, if all went according to plan.

(Even with Alloran’s voice vanished from my mind, I nevertheless heard his scoff.)

It held all of my memories, all of my personality—even that which resided in Alloran’s half of our shared skull. It could metabolize its own _kandrona_ with the ingestion of a supplement derived from the human oatmeal. It was redundant, bifurcated, like the two strands of the human genetic molecule—for every thread that would leave the coalescion, a mirror that would not, the two kept in perfect harmony by the self-repairing transmitters ensheathing each axon.

And it could meld with itself without noticeable value drift, as I had confirmed through Leeran hypersight—I had doubled it now seven separate times, each without any detectable shift in its values and priorities.

It was the beginning of something new. Something new as _I_ had been new—the herald of a fundamental shift in the evolution of Yeerk and Andalite—

(—and human and Taxxon and Hork-Bajir, too.)

If it could be perfected, it would usher in a new epoch, my first fledgling attempt to move pieces on the larger board. It was an ambition my siblings would have called magic, or madness—a work so complex that I had been unable even to _conceive_ of it until I had seen the wonders of the Arn and the Naharans with my own eyes, begun to look past Seerow’s corrosive madness and comprehend the brilliance within.

( _Alloran’s eyes,_ whispered a faint and dying part of me—but I ignored it.)

I was still far, _far_ from deployment, of course—from beginning the process of replacing Telor and Silat with Kandrona, and of merging with it myself. That was the sort of action you could take only once, a decision that could not be recalled or remade. I needed to be certain beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt, or desperate beyond all reasonable measure.

But today—

Today—

After all of the failures, all of the false starts, all of the empty, dead-end paths—

Today, I would test Kandrona’s _true_ steadfastness. Today, I would see if Kandrona could metabolize a natural Yeerk, in addition to copies of itself—would see if it could absorb another’s memories and experiences and physical, biological components without suffering dilution of its own true form. If it _could_ —

Reaching out with my mind, I toggled the controls on my fighter, bringing it to the predetermined distance, controlling the exact depth to which the Leeran’s influence penetrated the isolated facility. Inside and outside and all around my head, the universe blossomed, unfolding with infinite information, endless possibility, and I saw—

 _Kilgam 1, of Telor, who had grown in the flourishing of the journey between the stars, who had never taken a host, no piece of it had_ ever _been part of a host. It was a throwaway, a scrap of disposable mindstuff, knowing only the hunger, the longing, the desire to be a_ part _, and it was frightened, terrified, why had Telor amputated it, ostracized it, cut it off from the sharing and left it in the cold, the dark, it saw the Visser, it SAW THE VISSER—_

I felt the echoes of Kilgam’s horror, felt its fear, its revulsion, as it saw what I intended, saw its own end approach—felt its desperation peak, and crash—watched it watch through my eyes as I lifted it up in its container, lifted and carried it—

The vision popped like a bubble as I stepped beyond the reach of the slumbering Leeran and back over to the metal chamber that housed Kandrona, now one hundred and twenty-eight times as large as myself, the equivalent of sixty-four Esplin-and-Alloran brains. It was small, far smaller than an ordinary coalescion needed to be in order to be self-sustaining, and yet it had survived for over fourteen cycles with only an occasional infusion of the _kandrona_ precursor supplement.

There was a part of me that had wanted to watch the dissolution—to move the Leeran closer and take part in the experiment, even if only vicariously. But this was a delicate moment, and there was no telling whether the influence of hypersight might have some unpredictable effect on how Kandrona interfaced with Kilgam.

So I summoned my patience, wrapping it around myself like a cloak, and pretended stone as I upended the smaller container over the larger.

_One._

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

I kept counting with one layer of my attention, even as another continued to imagine the thousand things that shouldn’t go wrong (but would) and a third, fourth, and fifth controlled my puppet bodies on Earth, Honoghr, and the homeworld.

_Thirteen._

_Fourteen._

If it _worked—_ if there was no value drift—

_Seventeen._

_Eighteen._

There were any number of ways the process could fail, I told myself, dampening the naïve excitement that had begun to take hold. Most of them would not even require divine intervention—only the mundane failure of miscalibration, miscalculation, an incomplete understanding of the causal dynamics at work.

_Twenty-three._

_Twenty-four._

And yet, the excitement was incorrigible. Since the day I had taken Alloran, everything had been—

Small.

Tame.

_Obvious._

It had been war, yes, and that was thrilling enough in the moment. But it had been war no different from any other—ships and casualties, supply lines and espionage. The sort of war Alloran was born for, the sort he already _knew_ how to wage.

This—

If I could take a hundred bodies at once—a thousand—a _million—_ hold the resources of an entire species in my singular grasp, and move them all as one—

_Thirty-nine._

_Forty._

And more—if I could spread myself from star to star, perhaps even move beyond the galactic disk, all without ever losing the closeness of the sharing—as intimate as Alloran and I were intimate, two minds so deeply intertwined that we had ceased to exist as separate entities—

_Forty-seven._

_Forty-eight._

It was a distant dream, perhaps unreachable. Perhaps _impossible_ , doomed from the outset by the laws of physics or the whims of the gods.

But it was closer than it had ever been before. And even if the gods _were_ watching, even if they moved to forestall it—

Well. In a sense, that would be a victory all its own—a sign that powers great enough to shift the stars themselves had taken notice of me, had moved to contain me. I did not _want_ to lose, but if I had to, I would take that failure over any other.

_Sixty._

_Sixty-one._

It would take longer to be certain of success, but by now, a failure should be evident. Ruthlessly dispelling the urge to hesitate, I reached out once more, easing my fighter closer, bringing the Leeran into range—

I could see it at once—feel it, smell it, the instant the field encompassed us both, though I took another three eternities to be certain, to _force_ myself to see it, and absorb its impact.

Change.

It was small—subtle—but it was undeniably there. The protections I had put into place—the entire value stabilization framework—they had failed. It was Kandrona no longer—it had been moved by the shadow of Kilgam, shifted by the smallest fraction, a degree insignificant—

—as insignificant as the space between two stars in the sky.

I waited for emotion to rise—anger or frustration or dejection or ennui. But there was nothing—only a quiet resignation, a sort of muted galvanization. I could feel my resolve hardening as I pressed the switch to evacuate the chamber, dumping the failed Kandrona out into the vacuum, as I triggered the process that would produce the next clone, begin the next iteration of the experiment.

There was time and time to spare, and I would not waste a moment of it on grief.

 


	39. Interlude 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SHOUTOUT TO COUTEAUBLEU who is something like 99% responsible for this chapter existing and also something like 75% responsible for its content.
> 
> All right. The usual: sorry for sucking and having long hiatuses. Also the usual: comments and reviews and feedback REALLY makes a difference in my motivation, so please write some, either here or over at r/rational.
> 
> Somewhat less the usual: I have nothing to do on Friday except work on Tobias, so I'm 33% confident Tobias will be posted by Sunday night and 85% confident it will be posted by Wednesday a week from now.
> 
> Even less the usual: I found an artist to do covers, thanks to you! I won't blab their name here without checking with them first, but they are AWESOME to work with and the covers they are producing are DOPE and very much make me nostalgic for the '90's.
> 
> Y'all are the best. Really, you are. Thanks so much for your patience.

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## I’m a soldier for the Yeerk invasion and I’m dying. Ask me an…

 

**Author: ZombieAsInAlanis**

**Submitted: 2 days ago**

**Last answer: Just now**

 

Alright, let’s do this. 10PM UTC+1 tonight.

First thing first, I’ve arranged for confirmation of my identity with u/limewarden (thanks, Animorphs, for the overall method). As you can see in this video, I own a laser gun, which I used to burn through various households objects in my flat, responded to some of limewarden’s prompts, showed realtime events on TV, etc.

As to why I’m doing this…shit. I’m still not sure I’m going to actually go through with it. But if they had the resources to hunt me down, they’d have the resources to save me, so idk. I have less than a week to live, so this is basically me checking off my personal bucket list.

Let’s talk a bit about me. My name is Starrat 731. I’m a part of the invasion force that was sent to take over the Earth a few months ago. My first exposure to a human host was in training on the mothership, and then they stationed me in Paris as a sleeper agent. I was rotating in and out of a host along with about ten other Yeerks for a while until they figured out the oatmeal thing (yeah, it’s legit) and now Alexandre Laurent is all mine (don’t feel sorry for him, he’s an asshole).

My job description was basically “gather information, don’t get noticed, don’t die.” Kind of a cushy job, really, until the Animorphs made their broadcast (serious question aside, is no one else disturbed by the fact that they survived a fucking _meteor strike?)_. Now Paris and the banlieues are being quarantined, and the military is combing through the city, looking for, well, me.

I’m pretty sure I’ll die before they find me. Ten million is a lot of people to comb through, and it’s not like they have long-range Yeerk detectors. And I’m going to run out of oatmeal pretty soon.

In the meantime, though, I’m willing to answer questions. Nothing too strategically relevant, of course, and don’t try to figure out where I am. Oh, and I guess you can ask about Alexandre, too, if you want to know his perspective or whatever.

EDIT: fixed spelling mistakes. I’m good with English, but I get my sloppy typing habits from my host.

EDIT: alright, I’m receiving lots of threats and insults and stuff, so I’d like to make something clear: you’re wasting your time. You don’t know where I am, you can’t reach me, and you can’t hurt my feelings. The way this works is, I only answer questions I’m interested in. I’m not going to apologize or beg forgiveness from every single angry internet guy who sends me a rant. Yeah, we killed like a million of you, and we were trying to enslave you, and yeah, I get it, that’s awful and you’re angry. Move on and ask something we DON’T all already know.

 

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* * *

## Q4 – Friends in the pool?

**SoccerJack asked:**

Did you have friends in the Yeerk pool? Like were there a few other Yeerks you especially liked to talk to?

Do you have friends now? Either other Yeerks, or just regular people you like to talk to or hang out with?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 days ago):**

In the pool: no comment.

Now: I can’t answer in detail (identifying info) but yes to both. I avoid hanging out with other Controllers too much, for obvious security reasons (though we chat online a lot). But there are people both near where Alexandre lives and near where he works that I enjoy being around.

Also, I do a lot of sightseeing.

 

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* * *

## Q17 – Humans vs Other speceis?

**throwaway102934 asked:**

Have you ever been in other species? Or in other people besides Alexandre?

If so: what's it like? Do they have different qualia? Like, if you've been in a species that has sonar, could you describe what that's like to a human? Or do colors seem different to different people? Anything like that?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 days ago):**

No and no. Remember, like 99.999% of the time, there’s not enough hosts to go around (hence my presence in your beautiful city).

Re: color: sort of. Imagine that colors are letters. You’re thinking something like, “When Ana sees a G, does Bernard see a Y?” And the answer there is no, just like when I take my glasses off I don’t suddenly think your hand has seven fingers on it. It still has five fingers, they’re just blurry. Ana and Bernard both see the same “letters,” except they see them in different “handwriting” (not counting color-blind people, blah blah).

It’s a lot like when you go to Carrefour and you see a whole bunch of TVs next to each other, and some of them are slightly off from the rest. That’s it. You’re running the same basic software on the same basic hardware. Same sensations for everyone.

Re: different qualia: I honestly couldn’t describe it in a way that would make sense to you. Most species have most of a core set of senses and emotions (sight, hearing, fear, anger, etc), but they all feel them on wildly different scales, and they all have different secondary senses. Humans have a really good sense of depth, and extremely sharp awareness of their environment, whereas other species have ridiculously fine senses of smell and taste, or amazing balance and proprioception, or the ability to map heat and air currents around them in three dimensions, and perceive how they’re going to evolve.

Honestly, humans beat most hosts, but I wouldn’t mind flight or telepathy.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, since people ask: the stuff about other species is second-hand. Turns out Yeerks talk to one another! Funny, right?

 

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* * *

## Q2 – Politics?

**Cannibal_Capybara asked:**

Starrat, what is your take on the recent French election? Is it meaningfully different from Alexandre’s?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 days ago):**

I thought the debates were fascinating. You can learn a lot about a culture by knowing who its politicians are, what ideologies they represent in truth, what messages they put forward instead of that, and in general what they think counts as a strong argument.

I didn’t care much for the results, myself. I’m the cultural equivalent of a guy who shows up at a football match between two teams he doesn’t know. I like to watch, but I don’t really care about the outcome.

Alexandre likes to feel smug about being above politics. He didn’t pay attention to the debates, especially after he realized we weren’t going to vote.

 

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* * *

 

## Q1 – Langue et transfert

**Beaker305 asked:**

Monsieur "Starrat", votre anglais est très bon, mais j'ai une petite question logistique: vous semblez parler l'anglais comme langue maternelle, mais vous prétendez utiliser uniquement les connaissances d'Alexander Laurent. On peut supposer que votre français est encore mieux. En mettant de côté la nature exclusivement répréhensible de votre espèce, je suis curieux de savoir comment accéder aux souvenirs et aux expériences d'Alexander si rapidement. De plus, je suis curieux de savoir si vous conservez les souvenirs et les expériences lorsque vous changez d'hôte. Je ne m'intéresse pas à moi même, mais serait-il possible pour vous de donner aux compétences d'anglais d'Alexander directement à une autre personne?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 days ago):**

Regarding skill transfer: that sounds like tactically valuable information to me, so no comment.

Alexandre’s mother tongue is French, and he reads and writes English a lot better than he speaks it (which is to say, not so well that his neighbors look down on him for it).

 

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* * *

## Q4.LF – wait, as equals?

**Odysseum asked:**

> >But there are people both near where Alexandre lives and near where he works that I enjoy being around.
> 
> Waiwaiwait—like, you enjoy interacting with them _as equals?_ Or you get some sort of raw sensory pleasure because e.g. they’re cute or they smell good?

Regardless, that’s really creepy. I guess I was still thinking of the invasion as something far away, something the Americans have to deal with. But if you’ve got sleeper cells in France, you probably have them in Germany, Japan, Russia, Brazil … *shudders*

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 days ago):**

Re: the invasion: well, there’s like a handful of sleeper agents, and 7+ billion humans. You’re probably safe (for now).

Re: friends: more the former, although the latter’s definitely in there a little bit. “Equals” isn’t exactly the right term, since I’m obviously lying to them about extremely important things, but… I don’t know, I respect them as interesting people?

EDIT: Look, I can see the thread below confused and upset a lot of people, so I’m going to start over and try to sum it up in simple terms. tl;dr nihilist moral relativism, maybe?

You ever had a friend who you knew for years and years until you found out they did something super fucked up, once? And then you suddenly called into question everything you knew about them and their character?

_Why?_

Like, all the data you already had was still one hundred percent relevant to how they would be and act around you. It’s not like they’re suddenly going to start raping babies in front of you or shouting “nigger” at the dinner table or whatever. If they’re ashamed of it, they already _were_ ashamed of it, they dealt with it a long time ago, and they’re not going back. If they’re not ashamed of it, they already _were_ not ashamed of it, they’ve clearly decided not to act that way around you, and there’s no reason for any of that to change unless _you_ force the issue.

It’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell. It’s live-and-let-fucking-live. It’s not like there’s not some coherent _thing_ that’s a person, to the point where what they did ten years ago matters at all. Or, like, for _some_ people, maybe, what they did ten years ago matters, but that’s because they make a deliberate choice that it _will_ matter, and they keep making that choice over and over again, the same way.

But that’s all it is. A tendency to make the same choices the same way. And some people, the way they make choices, I like it. I like the stuff they do that’s predictable, and I keep coming back for more of the same, or I like the way they surprise me and prove that my stereotype of them isn’t accurate yet.

And that’s _all there is to it._ I like what I like, and I don’t like what I don’t like, and I pursue the former and avoid the latter. And I don’t try to _talk myself into_ not liking what I like, or liking what I don’t.

Some of you are all twisted up about me being a hypocrite for enslaving Alexandre but having respect for Hélène and Jean-Luc. But the problem isn’t that I’m hypocritical so much as _you think I’m supposed to be consistent_ according to human principles.

It’s like you haven’t figured out that I’m a parasite. Like you don’t _really get it,_ like you think I should be a parasite with social primate morality or something. My choices are 1) live in the cold and the dark forever or 2) ride along inside somebody’s brain. (And the choice of brain is relevant. When I’m in a stupid brain, I’m stupid. When I’m in a smart brain, I’m smart.)

So no, I’m not going to go live in a cow brain or something like that, any more than you’re going to, I don’t know, give up all of your nutrition and clean water to starving people in Africa until you’re so emaciated and malnourished that your IQ drops to 60. And the same is true for all of the other “solutions” that whomstdve was proposing. Sure, I _could_ give Alexandre control part of the time. But I don’t see you all carrying quadriplegics around on your back, letting them use you to pick up stuff or whatever.

The problem is, you’re looking for some kind of totally consistent set of rules for determining right and wrong, as if it’s a law of physics. You’re overlooking the fact that you have a suuuuuper biased and limited perspective. It makes sense for monkeys, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense for everyone. Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Sure, in a perfect universe, I could have a body that was all my own (without losing half my processing power), just like in a perfect universe, you’d all eat synthetic burgers and nobody would ever step on a bug or a flower.

But in the meantime, the only difference is, you’re feeling _guilty_ about those burgers, and I’m just…not. And on a certain level, that makes sense to me. I don’t have anything to prove, I’m not trying to cast down your beliefs to prop up mine. Your values are perfectly valid and consistent. They’re just not mine.

I _will_ say this much: it’s not looking so good for _me,_ but Yeerks on the whole are doing a hell of a lot better than you, and we’re doing it _without_ killing each other all the time.

 

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* * *

## Q28 – Humans are humans too

**ControlGroup9 asked:**

Ok, /a, is this legit? Could anyone have faked that video? Does anyone know limewarden in person, and is _that_ person known and trustworthy to someone else?

EDIT: I’m told limewarden is a well-known moderator. Alright then. (sorry, I created an account for this, I don’t know the community)

Even assuming "Starrat" is an actual alien, this could still be another one of Esplin's publicity stunts, so keep your guard up, as we will likely have no immediate way of verifying whether or not this guy is lying.

 _Supposing_ that this is the genuine act of one yeerk, I am perhaps more disturbed than I was before. Starrat talks about his (her, its?) life not like a parasitic drone but like an individual with hopes and dreams. Seriously, alien slugs have "bucket lists?" But if you, Starrat, are truly capable of feeling pleasure and pain, excitement and fear, joy and wonder ... can you yeerks not recognize the horror in your denial of the same to the humans whose bodies you so mercilessly steal for yourselves?

Humans do have dreams and bucket lists too, Starrat. I don't know any formerly infested people myself, but I've heard the stories from the Washington group, stories of the horror, the _horror_ at being trapped in your own mind, unable to move of your own volition, unable to scratch the itch of your own desires, deprived utterly of the freedom even to keep your imagination to yourself. Can you imagine what it's like to be controlled in that way? How can you not _see_ the moral atrocity of your invasion?

Wait, of course you see it. You can read the pain directly from the mind of your host, yet somehow you  _continue_ occupying his body. The moral thing for you to do is crawl out of his head and _die right now_.

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (1 day ago):**

Re: the bucket list thing: not exactly as you imagine it. My…let’s call it my purpose, is to learn and amass new experiences. That’s as close as I can get to describing my deepest drive. This seemed like the last opportunity I’d have to do so, so I figured I’d go for it, and make it count. I didn’t mean a literal list of “things I dreamed I’d do before I died,” though I _am_ going to try skydiving if I get the chance.

Re: pleasure and pain: I think you’re confused. Feeling someone else’s pain and feeling empathy for that pain aren’t the same thing.

For starters, I think you’re way overestimating the horror part of the enslavement experience. It’s not like our hosts are in constant physical pain. We can control some of our hosts’ feelings, both with direct brain “contact” and with a healthy diet, sports, etc. The horror you heard about was probably accurately reported, true, but it was at its fullest when the humans were in cages or just before and just after infestation. While we’re actually in the brain, it’s more of a muted, quiet, existential horror, and we can both ignore it most of the time. Right now, Alexandre knows I’m about to die, so most of what he’s experiencing is awkwardness with some hope and a bit of boredom.

Second, I’m guessing you’re one of those people who thinks of morality as an absolute thing. Like, if you feel pain, you realize that pain is bad and no-one should have to feel it. That’s not really how it works (source: member of a spacefaring race that’s interacted with the majority of intelligent species on this side of the galaxy).

The only reason you believe that ethics are a thing that exists is because your species evolved to have strong social mechanisms, and empathy was a shortcut for reducing computational overhead. So when you see someone suffer, you feel bad, especially if you feel like you’re similar to them. (Most advance species have high empathy, btw, that’s not uniquely a human thing.)

The thing is, most species feel empathy in a _different_ way. The obvious metaphor is “humans kill cows,” but that doesn’t work all that well as a metaphor because the social dynamics are pretty different (though I guess the invasion force at Ventura was kind of leaning toward being “vegans,” sort of, not really).

Anyway, the way we see humans is closer to the way you see your computers or your cars, or maybe your pets. Except not really, because you have a ton of movies about computers and animals that start demanding and deserving rights and dignity and stuff. My point is, you’re not “people,” you’re resources. I know all about human psychology research on dehumanization, I understand a little bit about iterated prisoners’ dilemmas. And given the current situation (thanks again, Animorphs), maybe we’d have been better off if we pretended to respect your agency and tried approaching you as if you were our equals, and tried to create some sort of voluntary infestation program. There _are_ plenty of benefits, and I can guarantee there are millions of humans who would be thrilled to have what Alexandre is shitting on.

But now we’re getting into tactical considerations, not ethical ones. Long story short, I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by letting my host go right now. So…sorry not sorry?

 

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* * *

## Q115 – Will you kill Alexandre?

**i_saw_mal_kissing_beatrix_kiddo asked:**

Are you going to kill Alexandre?

And, um, I realize you’re an alien and you don’t care about us the same way we care about each other and you have no reason to listen to me, but, _please please please_ don’t kill him? Maybe an individual life doesn’t matter to you, but they really really matter to us. We don’t know that guy, but we don’t want him to die. If you can find any reason, any little voice within yourself that tells you to let him live, any way that you can get what you want without murdering him on your way out…please listen to it?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (1 day ago):**

I haven’t decided. Standard procedure is yes, and also I don’t like him very much. But there are reasons not to, sure.

EDIT: Copying this up from subthread.

It’s mostly existential dread.

You know that clawing fear that humans have around being forgotten? The desperate sense that nothing matters unless there’s some sort of legacy that can be carried on? The frantic desire to live on through your kids, or make some kind of impact on history?

Well, Yeerks have that, too. Even stronger than humans, I’d say…we might not have the same set of social dynamics that you guys evolved, but in a certain sense we’re 10x _more_ prosocial than you are.

Normally, my death...well, okay, occasionally there are accidents and predators and natural disasters and things, but those are pretty rare. To the extent that Yeerks die of old age, we almost _always_ die surrounded by friends and family, with a sort of…passing of the torch, or speaking for the dead, or something like that. There’s no homeless Yeerks dying in back alleys from an OD. We always have a chance to say our last words. We always have a chance to pass on what we thought was most important. Our most treasured memories, our most valuable lessons, the things that made us most uniquely ourselves. There are social structures in place to preserve them in a meaningful way.

So the situation I’m in right now, it’s sort of analogous to you, dying, off in a cave somewhere, such that your friends and family will never know what happened, and *also* everything you ever accomplished with your life will be quietly undone and erased from history. It’s not _really_ like that, but that’s the emotional flavor to it.

That’s part of why I’m doing this AMA, actually. It’s like…leaving a diary behind? Or writing a goodbye letter to your family. Not as good as actually seeing them, but better than nothing. Better than oblivion.

And if Alexandre Laurent lives, then, well, even as much as he hates me, he’s not going to _forget_ me. Some bit of me gets to survive a little longer, inside his head. Maybe just a few years or decades, if he just goes off and dies like you humans tend to. Or maybe forever, if he gets recaptured and reinfested and some bit of me gets transferred back to the rest of my people through his memories. You’re going to be mad at me for hoping that happens, but…whatever.

 

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* * *

## Q67 – What do you think of Esplin?

**StrongerThànYou asked:**

I’ll be a little more blunt and direct than I normally would in a situation like this, since you’re being so candid (thanks for that).

Esplin/Visser made some claims about the astropolitical situation, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to corroborate or elaborate. I’m particularly interested in your take on what the hell we’re caught in the middle of, even if it’s just really broad strokes like “well, first they shot Franz Ferdinand and then everybody took sides.” Right now, literally all we have is Andalites = bad news, Yeerks = mostly bad news but feeling kind of sorry about it.

If that cuts too close to “strategically relevant,” then I’d just like to hear more about the memory preservation culture you mentioned to MattTheRat. Are there artifacts involved? Are there particular lessons or experiences that are sort of mythic or monolithic in your culture, like Lafayette or Napoleon or the parables of Jesus? Is this stuff related at all to how Yeerks are educated?

And obviously, what’s your opinion of the Visser? What do you think of his actions in Ventura? On a similar note, what is your opinion of the “Animorphs” and their actions thus far?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (1 day ago):**

Andalites are…complicated. They’re bad for Yeerks because they’re trying to kill us all, or at least lock us up on one planet that’s perpetually stuck in the stone age. They’re bad for Earth because they’re increasingly ready to use overwhelming force to achieve that goal.

Colonies have myths and stories that date back milleniae. So when one is destroyed in one moment…it hurts. I have Yeerk “words” for it. I have English words for it too: genocide, atrocity, crime against humanity, you get the idea. So yeah, I’m pissed that the Visser killed an entire colony to cover up his mistakes. It also made things obviously worse re: interspecies relations, so it’s not remotely close to “worth” it.

And you know, I really shouldn’t be saying this. But on another level, I don’t want to _not say it._ The Visser did what he did. I don’t want to let it slide. I don’t want it to be forgotten because it’s unconvenient or awkward.

Re: Animorphs: I guess I’m mainly puzzled. They’re teenagers. How the hell did they blow up our main pool, and how did they survive a goddamn meteor strike? This picture does not make sense; something isn’t adding up; there has to be more to this story. Is this Harry Potter, and this Marco kid is the Chosen One or something?

Anyway. Scale matters, Ventura was worse than the broadcast. But they murdered one of my people on live TV just to make a point. How do you feel about the _human_ groups that do that sort of thing?

 

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* * *

 

## Q295 – Alexandre connard

**MrsRomgoc asked:**

Why do you consider Alexandre an asshole? (Projection?)

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (13 hours ago):**

I’ll be honest—bitching about the infestation situation doesn’t get you very many points. Like, at some point you gotta have some stoicism about it, and figure out how to live with it. You can’t just mope around _forever._

On a more human level: he’s not particularly nice to his coworkers, he acts like every romantic rejection is the woman’s fault, he doesn’t keep his promises, and he litters. Like, literally litters, in the way that you usually only see assholes do in movies _specifically so that you’ll know that they’re assholes._

I kept almost everything else the same when I moved in, but that had to stop.

 

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* * *

 

## Q11 – Favorite food?

**FourchetteRouge asked:**

Nothing strategically relevant, eh? What’s your favorite Earth food? (besides braaaains!)

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 days ago):**

Brains aren’t my food, they’re more like my favorite bean bag chairs!

Ralph’s brand maple oatmeal. It has this subtle flavor of not dying a slowl and painful death. I just love it for some reason.

(Actually, it tastes like cardboard and sugar; there are good American cereals; oatmeal ain’t one of them.)

Real answer is probably just croissants. There’s something beautiful about a thing that’s crafted with so much love and effort, just for us to consume.

(Subtle metaphor! But seriously viennoiseries are the best.)

 

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* * *

 

## Q192 – Quantum physics and qualia

**i_shall_throwaway asked:**

how the fuck do you unify quantum physics with general relativity to produce a quantum theory of gravity that doesn’t have infinities everywhere

how the fuck do you make wormholes and phasers and communicate faster-than-light

as long as im asking an alien to solve longstanding dilemmas in science, it occurs to me that if anyone knows the answers to the hard problem of consciousness its the aliens with universal brain adapters. any insight you shed would be appreciated.

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (23 hours ago):**

You’re not going to be happy.

  1. No idea.
  2. No idea.
  3. It’s complicated.



The “hard problem” doesn’t really seem to matter all that much to me? It’s basically navel-gazing, unless you’re trying to decide whether a complicated automaton deserves rights, in which case it’s obviously going to _get_ rights whether it’s conscious or not because you humans are manipulatable as fuck and if the robot makes enough sad sounds you’re going to start empathizing with it even if it’s _provably_ unconscious. You people keep pet rocks, for goodness sake.

As for whether it’s _generally plausible_ that X or Y process is conscious, once it reaches a certain level of complexity…I don’t know. Until a few years ago, my species hadn’t even entered the bronze age. We’re piloting technology we could _never_ create ourselves (and before you get all butthurt remember that you have _no fucking clue_ how your computer works). I can at least say that consciousness is definitely not a black-or-white binary thing; it’s absolutely a gradient.

Also, fun fact: your own brains are a lot more Yeerk-like than you think. What it feels like, from the inside, is something like shepherding a whole bunch of kindergarteners around. You’ve got, I don’t know, modules or sub-organs or clusters of whatever, and they’re all more-or-less autonomous, and they’re all engaged in this up-and-down sort of communication that involves a whole lot of bullying and coercion. There’s a _lot_ of processing that goes on distributed throughout the body, enough to be called conscious at least in a weak sense, and it’s pretty ruthlessly ruled by the brain. You don’t notice, because you only identify with and consciously perceive the brain’s top-down perspective, and when it disagrees with the body it _makes its own reality._ Like, your brain thinks your hand ought to be _here,_ and your hand gets sensory data from the environment and is all “No, I’m actually over _there,_ ” and your brain (or your spinal cord, really) goes WTF, _move_ , and the hand moves.

(This gets especially nuts with things like vision, where your brain predicts that the guy in front of you is pulling out a gun, and your eyes are like “no, it’s a wallet.” If the prediction is strong enough, it can straight-up drown out the “no, it’s a wallet” signal such that you _really actually see_ a gun. Like, you will _remember_ a gun, and if somebody was playing back an image constructed from your memory, they’d see a blurry gun-wallet hybrid, even though there were no gun-photons and only wallet-photons.)

I’m sitting on top of all of this, as it’s going on, and I can sort of squint at and sample what’s happening, and if I need the signals to change I just…overwhelm the existing ones. It takes a while to get the hang of it, and really I rely on Alexandre’s brain to do something like 95% of the work, but Alexandre was _also_ relying on his brain to do 95% of the work. Alexandre is like a thin layer on top of a bunch of control systems, that are themselves on top of a bunch of control systems, that are on top of a bunch of control systems, and to the extent that he’s conscious, they’re conscious a _little._ Like, they can cause him to take actions, cause him to feel emotions, seize direct control over his body, that sort of thing.

Ugh. I’m not explaining this well, and it’s a tangent anyway. I’m going to stop there.

 

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* * *

 

## Q811 – what Alexandre wants?

**NanoSadistToxicology asked:**

I have a question for Alexandre, actually. What does he want to have happen to you? What does he want for himself?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (22 hours ago):**

Alexandre here (believe it or not). Sorry, I’m not very creative. At various times, I’ve wanted to see Starratt chopped up, burned, served à la Bourguignonne alongside escargot, covered in salt, etc. etc.

Probably the cleverest I’ve come up with is just burying him in a giant vat of oatmeal, so he’d never die but also never get out, and just be stuck blind and immobile forever.

I’ve also had (quite ridiculous) fantasies of seizing control of my body and shooting through my head with the laser gun, exceeeeept this is actually biologically impossible, so buggers.

More serious: I have not really thought about it in “plan” terms. I want to be free again. Then I’ll make my own decisions. I’ll get to feel what I want in my own body, on my own terms. I’ll get to have dreams and fantasies and stupid ideas without someone watching all the time, waiting to pick them apart. I want Starrat to suffer, but more than that, I just want this to be over. We will see what happens after.

 

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* * *

 

## Q31 – What is “Good”?

**SwastikasButNotTheRacistOnes asked:**

What does "good" look like to you? Your answer can take the form of defining good or laudable acts, describing a good society, or expressing what makes another person or individual good. How does that conception of good square with that of your hosts and how do feel about your hosts conception of good? As a corollary feel free to answer the same questions for "bad".

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (19 hours ago):**

*Sigh.* This again. I guess it depends on what “good” you mean? Like, when someone says “wow, this is a really good fruitcake!” it’s a valid english sentence, but it’s obviously not the same good you’re talking about. There’s the level of “what gets me my dessert” and then you have “what keeps my parents happy with me” and then “what do my peers approve of” and then “what do I approve of when I am alone in the dark” and then eventually (some of you) get to the level of “what should I approve of such that it both convinces others to approve of it to and also that, if it works, the outcome will be one we all still approve of.”

Mostly ethical thinking is a process of internalizing social norms and outside pressures into your own thinking. It often boils down to “treat others as you would have them treat you” but the details can vary from culture to culture.

So the Yeerk conception of “ethics” and “good” would be pretty similar to yours on some points (though pools are a cultural entity MUCH stronger than most tribes). Killing is bad, stealing is bad, things that spark never-ending spirals of escalation are bad, etc. The main difference is probably in circle-of-concern…human culture taken at a glance seems to have this trend of an ever-expanding circle-of-concern, with you guys outgrouping fewer and fewer things and consistently seeing (or imagining) benefits from it. That’s less true of Yeerk society. Our ingroup-outgroup boundaries are a lot softer and more porous and more like a gradient than yours, but also we’re a lot less likely to “see ourselves” in completely different species.

Regarding your underlying question “How do you feel about being a monster to your host and the fact that your host thinks you’re a monster”…I’m mostly okay with it? It’s not like my species evolved in a multi-cultural environment where we had to learn to cooperate with and respect different ways of thinking and being. We take what we need, and that’s about as far as it goes.

I guess, all else being equal, I’d somewhat look down on a Yeerk who spent an inordinate amount of time psychically tormenting their host, but that has less to do with “but it’s wrong” and more to do with a) it’s going to have corrosive physiological effects on the host body, b) it’s boring after a while and novelty is close to a terminal goal, and c) it’s somewhat distasteful in the same way a man masturbating in the street is distasteful. There are just better things to do.

 

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* * *

## Q31.LF – it IS absolute 

**ControlGroup9 asked:**

> >I'm guessing you think of morality as an absolute thing.

It is. It is the set of logical consequences of a certain collection of axioms, including an axiom about empathy. Empathy is what makes morality  _morality_ , and not just some sort of rational egoism. The mere fact that you evolved to not recognize this, or that I evolved to recognize it, does not motivate me to change my own position. The only moral response to a species which does not recognize morality is hostility.

> >So, sorry not sorry.

Look at you, being an apologist for slavery using flippant idioms from your host's own enslaved intelligence.

Fine, you don't want to die? I get it. So go to a zoo and infest a  _monkey_ , if you absolutely must have a host. Hell, go to a hospital and pilot the body of a coma patient. I'll wait. Maybe if you yeerks can show that kind of commitment to minimizing enslavement, we can talk about peace. Maybe.

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (11 hours ago):**

That sounds like a cool insult, honestly. "Your mother infested a monkey!" I mean, I could, but a monkey body is a serious downgrade from a human body, and also I would probably die because most monkeys don't sit on caches of maple oatmeal.

> >The only moral response to a species which does not recognize morality is hostility.

I'd argue that it's a _practical_ response, not an ethical one, but yeah, I hear you. We had a shot at enslaving the entire planet and reaping the benefits (a huge war machine, relative safety from extinction) and we blew it, and now we're in an awkward position.

Rational egoism + benefits of hindsight tells me we'd have been better off if we'd approached the planet openly, and tried to build a Yeerk-human society based on consensus and cooperation, but I don't delude myself in thinking there's any higher value in ethics than "rational egoism" mixed with a heavy does of "being afraid of revenge" and capitalism. I wish we’d done it that way because it would’ve been more likely to _work,_ not because I give a shit, and I suspect if you dig deep enough, you’ll find the same is true from your end, too.

I’m not saying you should let go of your ethics or forgive us. I’d be happy if you did, but I don’t expect it. But the only power _your_ ethics have over _me_ is the power of the harm you can do to me. Which, given our particular circumstances, happens to be zero. So I’m afraid I go on not giving a shit.

 

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* * *

## Q19.F – Slug lives matter

**brainsalacarte asked:**

> >crawl out of his head and _die right now_

Has literally any living thing ever just _laid down and died_ because it realized there was a moral problem with some aspect of its existence? Has that kind of abstract, disembodied Thou Shalt ever mattered to anyone? Like, what were you even hoping to _accomplish_ there, other than virtue signaling?

Plainly, the only way to solve this problem is to take the third option and find some way for the Yeerks to exist as symbiotes rather than parasites or aggressors. I mean, COME ON, PEOPLE. WE SOLVED THIS ONE, LIKE, FIVE MINUTES AFTER THE VISSER’S BROADCAST.

I mean, shit. Can you imagine being a sapient individual with emotions and hopes and dreams and you’re a slug? A fucking _slug?_ Barely able to move around?

(I do realize this isn’t a question, I just wanted you to see this)

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (4 hours ago):**

You’re right and wrong at the same time. The problem isn’t so much being a slug. Being a Yeerk without host…I think it’s pretty close to what humans with total locked-in syndrome feel.

Like, you’re in Plato’s cave with 100 people, and every so often, they unchain one guy who gets to go outside and interact with the world, maybe bring back (metaphorical) food or (metaphorical) fire. For most of you, your only interactions with the outside world are talking with the people who got to go out of the cave. Maybe you spend a lot of time speculating, or preparing questions or instructions and trying to persuade people to agree to them.

Except they’re not reliable. You ask the last “scout” a question ike “Hey, what color were the trees?” and he answers “I didn’t look” or “I don’t remember.” So you make sure to ask the next guy to look at the trees, but other people _also_ have lots of questions, and the scout has only three days to look, and also he’s spent all of _his_ life building up a list of things he’s curious about, if he ever got the chance…

Then _you_ get to be the next guy out of the cave. You can see _everything._ You can do _everything._ You have hundreds of questions to answer, hundreds of things to try, including your own. You can interact with the world, and you have a _purpose_ …until three days are up, and then it’s back into the cave.

So yeah. Infestation is awesome. For me.

 

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* * *

 

## Q1222 - Joke

**ColonelOneill23 asked:**

Can you tell us a Joke, like you would to another Yeerk? Or just something that you personally find funny.

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 hours ago):**

Yeerks don’t have a sense of humor except when they infest a creature with a sense of humor.

Um. C'est un mec qui entre dans un café et plouf. Hé hé hé.

(For those who don’t get the joke, it’s like the French equivalent of “A man walked into a bar and said ‘ow.’”)

 

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* * *

 

## Q44 – What would your friends think?

**TheCheeseIsMadeOfMoon asked:**

You mentioned having human friends, that you respected.

Have you considered “coming out to them”? How do you think they’ll react?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 days ago):**

I did not consider that.

That…I don’t know what they’d say. I mean, there’s also the problem that they’ve never really met _me_ , just me pretending to be Alexandre. Maybe the ones who knew him before and after have a sense of who I am, and…I honestly don’t know how much their opinion would affect me.

We’ve talked about the invasion for, but…eh. Food for thoughts.

 

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* * *

 

## Q1904 – how much is alexandre

**burnit92 asked:**

fuck you

also how much of your philosophy is your own and how much of it is borrowed from alexander

also fuck you

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 hours ago):**

The game theory and sociology bits are mostly from Alexandre and my other hosts. The philosophy is mine.

 

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* * *

 

## Q9 – We all knew it was coming 

**RiggetyRi-UUUUUURRRPPP-ickRolled asked:**

Would you rather control one horse-sized duck or one hundred duck-sized horses?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 days ago):**

Neither. Opposable thumbs, man. Best thing since endoskeletons.

 

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* * *

 

## Q16.L – Repair our species’ relationships

**ControlGroup9 asked:**

> >I wish we’d done it that way because it would’ve been more likely to _work_ , not because I give a shit.

Openly admitting that you would totally enslave and exploit us if it were at all practical is  _not_ a great way to repair relations with a species that actually does think there is a higher value in ethics (or really any species for that matter). So tell me: if you could modify your biology so that you weren't dependent on another (intelligent) species to accomplish anything, would you do it? Or if you could modify your values so that you actually  _do_ value ethics/empathy intrinsically, would you do it, even if only for the purpose of fostering strategic cooperation with humans?

 

**ZombieAsInAlanis answered (49 minutes ago):**

I can't speak for my entire species, but personally speaking, my answers are “no” and “maybe.”

(but you’re absolutely on to something)

A full debate on this would include a bunch of information I'm not ready to share, but speaking in broad strokes...intrinsic values aren't really that important to humans. Values and social standards come from arrangements of convenience, and the standards change to follow the practical interests, not the other way around. They matter even less to Yeerks; where human societies change their outlook over the course of decades (eg regarding homosexuality), Yeerk societies change over the course of  _months_  (hence the Aftran force in Ventura having Second Thoughts).

If (and it's a big if) diplomatic relationships open, our outlook will matter on a personal and societal level, not on a grand strategy level. I'd argue that outlook doesn't really matter in realpolitik. Most human countries act like impulsive narcissists if we interpret them as coherent entities anyway.

The way it will work is, sooner or later, one of two things will happen:

  * Open war will start, until one side is incapable or unwilling to fight any longer (most metropolises will be smoking craters at that point; we have the high ground)
  * A country or two will start a program for Yeerk integration. There aren't many of us, so given a 0.1% "integration" rate, a population of 1,000,000 or more would be enough. All the Yeerks in the system could fit within Paris/NY/London (assuming we don't blow them up next; again, not speaking for high command, but I do want to point out it's on the table).



Let's assume everything goes well (it won't, the Visser's a jerk). There will be riots demanding we be all killed or sent off planet somehow, political movements and external pressure by other countries to stop the program. Let's assume they all blow over.

As this point, we'd basically have to hand ourselves over for the infestation program to proceed. No-one would accept it otherwise. We'd have so sign treaties, surrender our fleet and our military secrets to whatever country welcomes us, and put ourselves at their mercy.

At this point, integration becomes less about grand strategy and more about personal relationships. This is uncharted territory, because Yeerks have zero experience with consensual relationships so far. Like, imagine you come from a culture where all men/women you date are slaves. No, really. Take a minute and _actually imagine it._ That's the socially accepted norm for relationships: a master and a slave. That’s all you know. That’s all you’ve _ever_ known. _Nobody’s_ ever known anything else; there are no conscientious objectors who are ahead of their time and ringing the warning bell. The slave has absolutely no say in how the relationship works, what the master does, whether or when they have sex, when they spend time together, what they talk about, etc. Imagine those relationships are all you know... and then you date a millennial, who thinks relationships should be between equals.

No matter how well-intentioned you are, you're going to make blunders. You’re going to have knee-jerk anger when you’re disobeyed, you’re going to demand unreasonable things, etc. (this should be familiar to domestic abuse survivors)

That's why I'm saying values don't matter that much. Integration will be about Yeerks and humans co-inventing the rules of cohabitation, and learning to respect them. Eventually they will form habits which will become rules which will become an ethics code, and they'll all agree that people like me were awful and they're very sorry about us (and about Ventura, I guess).

And yeah, I guess I could pay more lip service to their future beliefs, help my species' diplomatic relations...but fuck that. I was never much for hypocrisy.

 

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	40. Chapter 30: Tobias

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: This is a (small) double update; note that there's an interlude immediately following. Also note that there will be a moderately large revision to the previous interlude coming with the NEXT update, which might be a couple weeks or more out.
> 
>  
> 
> Please comment/review, either here or over on r/rational!

**Chapter 30: Tobias**

‹Look, I’m not arguing with that, okay? I mean, _obviously_ there’s going to be stuff it isn’t safe or smart to tell me, especially while we’re still in the whole getting-to-know-each-other phase. But the more you _can_ tell me, the better I’ll be able to say things that are actually useful, and the better I’ll be able to analyze the Serenity data for you.›

I cocked my head as the two of us drifted past each other yet again, rising in opposite lazy spirals on the invisible geyser of hot air billowing up from the tarmac. Thàn was in the barn owl morph he’d hastily borrowed from Garrett, looking strange in the daylight, and I felt a tiny, irrepressible twinge of reflexive worry every time I caught sight of him.

‹It’s not my call,› I repeated. ‹If you get caught, or it turns out you’re not trustworthy—›

I broke off. We were nearly three miles up by this point, high enough that we ought to be able to make it to the spot Jake had described with one long, straight glide. ‹Come on,› I said, banking out of the curve and angling my wings as I pointed my beak toward the line of broken, crumpled hills in the distance.

‹It shouldn’t be _anyone’s_ call,› Thàn argued as he fell in beside me, his barn owl wings making no sound at all. ‹What I’m saying is, let’s talk on the meta level for a minute and _figure out_ which things it’s safe to tell me about. Things the Yeerks already know, for instance.›

‹Just because the Yeerks already know it doesn’t mean we want _you_ knowing that the Yeerks already know it,› I countered. ‹And the Yeerks aren’t the only ones we have to worry about information leaking to.›

‹Yes! Exactly. Plus one—that’s the sort of thing I want to talk through. And there are entanglements in the other direction, too—like, obviously you don’t want to _only_ keep quiet when there’s an interesting secret, or the mere fact that you’re shutting up will give it away. What I’m hoping for us to find is the stuff that’s in the intersection of high impact for getting me up to speed and making me useful, and low impact in terms of information security.›

‹You know, you’re starting to sound a _lot_ like somebody who’s looking to weasel as much info out of me as he can,› I grumbled.

‹ _I’ve already admitted that._ It’s not weaseling, it’s—gah. Look. Forget what I _sound like._ Just listen to the _actual advice_ I’m giving you, separate from your stereotypes, and decide whether they make sense on their own, and then take action accordingly.›

_You and Marco are either going to love each other or have some kind of Highlander fight._

But he had a point.

‹Fine,› I said. ‹Give me a minute.›

We flew onward as I thought, gliding gently downward, the air cool and empty, the wind whispering softly through my feathers and silently through Thàn’s.

It had been a while since I’d lined up all of the secrets we were keeping. There were things that we knew, and things that the Yeerks knew, and things that the Chee knew, and things that Paul Evans and President Tyagi knew, and things that everyone knew—

_Start from the beginning._

Elfangor. The Yeerks knew we’d made contact with him, but might not realize we had access to his morph or to his memories and personality. Paul would know that, thanks to having morphed _me_ —which meant Tyagi knew it, too—but there was a chance it hadn’t gone any farther than that.

The Chapmans, Cassie’s parents, Jake’s family—all of the people close to us who’d been taken before Ventura. That was mostly irrelevant, now. But the fact that Marco’s Dad and Jake’s brother Tom had been Controllers—and that Marco’s dad still was, along with Ax—

 _That, plus the overall makeup of the team._ Who we were, what our relationships were like. Paul would know most of it, but the Yeerks shouldn’t—

_What about when Visser Three pegged you as Tobias in D.C.? And name-dropped Cassie, Rachel, Jake, and Marco?_

Okay, fine, the Yeerks knew about _most_ of us. But they probably didn’t know about the new kid, or Tom, or Garrett—

— _and we’re going to keep it that way._

What else? There was the Ellimist, or Crayak, or whatever-the-hell it had been, in the Yeerk pool. Paul Evans didn’t know about _that_ ; the memory wouldn’t have encoded by the time he’d acquired me, and even though they’d let Tyagi acquire Ax, he hadn’t really been a part of it, so even if Tyagi checked she’d only know that we’d _told_ Ax that something weird had happened—

_Unless the god-thing is appearing to other people, too._

I sighed wordlessly.

Moving on—there was all of the stuff we’d put into the broadcast, all the people we’d given the morphing power to, the weird bracelet weapon that Rachel had lifted off Visser Three’s host at the high school, Ax’s little escape pod, the alleged cache of supplies Visser Three had stashed in Alaska—if they were still there, and if they weren’t just a bomb in the first place—the velociraptor morph that Cassie had managed to squeeze out of a cassowary somehow, and the couple of tons of oatmeal that the Chee had purchased and squirreled away—

— _oh, right, let’s not forget the ancient invincible pacifist dog robots—_

—and self-morphing and using morphs to scan people’s memories and hiding objects in morph—

— _well, Thàn already knows about_ that _, he’s been carrying all his own stuff with him all day long—_

I sighed again. ‹Okay,› I said, thinking slowly. _Definitely don’t tell him about the Chee, definitely don’t tell him about the Ellimist, hold off on telling him about Tyagi or the deadline until you can check with Jake._ ‹Um. Let’s see. Without saying anything that gives away too much—›

_—but try not to look too stingy, either—_

‹—Visser Three claimed he’d left a cache of supplies on an island in Alaska, back around the time of the Ventura impact. Saint Matthews cove, or something like that. We still haven’t checked that out, and Serenity might shed some light on whether it’s worth bothering to. Also, Jake said they were shipping oatmeal to China for a while before we managed to take out the factory, so it might be worth looking there, too. And—›

I hesitated.

_Don’t try to be Marco. Just make a decision._

‹—and there was some weird shit going on in Ventura just before the asteroid hit. Uh. About half an hour before. At the YMCA on Huffman Mill, where the Yeerk pool was, and also around Hines Peak outside L.A., and also maybe in the Homeland Security office in D.C.›

‹First off, thanks,› Thàn said. ‹And second—any clues about what kind of weirdness? For when I look at the data?›

‹Uh. Something anomalous. Like, not a transmission, not a morph, not ships moving around. Anything _weird_ would be good to know about, especially if it’s the kind of weird that also shows up somewhere else.›

‹Got it.›

There was a long silence, and then—

‹Tradesies,› said Thàn.

‹Did you just say _tradesies?›_

‹Yeah. So what? I was looking back over my summaries while we were on the plane, and I realized I forgot to mention something.›

‹Forgot.›

‹Yes. Actually. I had a lot on my mind, if you’ll recall, not least of which was the grenade that your buddy Garrett insisted on holding the _entire time._ But I remember _now._ You want to hear it, or not?›

‹Yeah. Sorry.›

‹That ship—the one on Mars, the one we think belongs to the Visser? It flitters all over the place, mostly at random, like he’s trying to make sure his movements aren’t predictable. But there are two places it’s visited over and over again—while _not_ sending any kind of signal—places that aren’t obvious the way that Mars and the back side of the Moon are obvious. One of them looks like it’s an object in orbit around the sun—it’s about as far out as the asteroid belt, and every time the ship visits that region it stops in a spot that’s a little further along, with the delta corresponding to how long it’s been since the previous visit.›

‹You know where that spot is now? You can predict it?›

‹Yeah. It doesn’t give off any signs that Serenity can detect, but I could give you a range for any given date in the future. A probability cone, really, but for anything in the next few months the cone would be fairly tight. And if the military can get some time on the James Webb telescope, we should be able to see that spot with a resolution of about one pixel per hundred kilometers. Not enough to see what it _is,_ but enough to detect that there’s something in there at all, as long as it’s not perfectly black.›

‹Or cloaked. Which it will be.›

‹They have _clo—_ ›

I heard an audible screech of frustration as Thàn cut himself off mid-thought. ‹Of course they do. That explains—gah.›

He broke off again, and I glanced over to see that he was flying with his eyes closed in an oddly human-looking sort of way. ‹ _Anyway,›_ he continued, his mental voice terse. ‹The other spot isn’t moving in the same way. I mean, it’s moving in an absolute sense—as much as there _is_ an ‘absolute sense,’ anyway—but it’s pegged to the reference frame of the sun, so if you had a coordinate system where the sun was still and the Earth was returning to the same spot every three hundred and sixty—›

‹I get it. Where?›

‹It’s almost exactly where the Earth will be in another hundred and fifty days. About five weeks after the Europa appointment and/or the arrival of Yeerk reinforcements to the system.›

I felt a tingle pass through my hawk body, as if the shadow of a larger predator had just passed over me. ‹That—does not sound good,› I said.

‹No, it does not.›

I was quiet for another hundred yards. ‹And he’s visited this spot how often?›

‹A dozen times at least.›

‹Starting when?›

‹I’ll have to double-check, but I think the first visit was right around Ventura.›

_Not good._

But what _kind_ of not good? A trap? A superweapon? Some kind of—of—

My thoughts stuttered, shuddered to a halt. I had no idea. Given what we knew of the Visser, it could be almost _anything._

_Then again, it’s not going to matter if we’re all dead three weeks from now._

I looked over at Thàn, at the owl body I had come to associate with Garrett. Garrett, who was yet again off on his own, facing unknown dangers without me there to help him, because the greater good called for us to split up.

_Oh, come on. It’s just the Chee. They literally can’t hurt a fly._

Unless Visser Three’s dog bribes were enough to get them to bend the rules. If their programming didn’t mind Yeerks, then it might not mind imprisonment-without-trial—

_Tobias—_

It wasn’t Garrett’s real voice—was just my memory, my stereotype—but it was no less stern for that, and no less effective, either. _Okay, okay,_ I thought. _Focus._

‹Thàn,› I said, breaking the silence.

‹Mmm?›

‹How would you defend the Earth against another Ventura?› I asked.

‹Convince whoever’s launching it not to,› he answered promptly.

‹If you couldn’t.›

‹Evacuate. Build an ark, if you have to.›

‹If you couldn’t.›

‹ _Steal_ an ark.›

‹If you couldn’t.›

There was a heavy pause as we continued our long, slow descent, moving a hundred feet forward for every fifteen feet of drop.

‹I guess I’d start by asking your Andalite buddy for ideas,› Thàn said softly. ‹Otherwise, I’d have to say there’s not really any defense. Even assuming you could throw up nukes like nobody’s business, it takes a _lot_ of force to move something that big, and if Visser Three was telling the truth about the Ventura rock only getting launched _after_ you guys blew up their pool—well, he got it from wherever it was up to a two hundred and forty thousand k-m-h targeted impact in less than an _hour._ There’s nothing we have that can stop that. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s nothing _they_ have that can stop that—it’s easier to get a boulder moving than to stop it once it’s rolling downhill.›

There was another long, expectant pause. ‹This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with one of those things you’re not cleared to tell me, would it?› Thàn asked, his voice quiet and hesitant.

I said nothing—only looked out at the horizon, at the brilliant splash of sunset color, orange and purple and red stretching almost halfway around the sky. One of the people we’d recruited had said that the sunsets were prettier all over the country these days, thanks to the lingering dust from the Ventura impact. It was blood, that color—blood and bone and ash, families and friends and houses and neighborhoods, lives and bodies vaporized in a flash, still haunting the skies weeks later. Jake’s dad was up there, somewhere—Jake’s dad, and Rachel’s mom, and every one of the kids I’d left behind at Oak Landing, and every foster family I’d ever stayed with—

‹Something like that,› I said finally. ‹Let’s just get to the others, and then we’ll talk more.›

We flew on in pensive silence.

 

*        *        *

 

I hadn’t really had a chance to savor it, what with the constant stress and impending doom and mission after mission after mission—

But I _really_ loved flying.

Garrett still hated it, so we usually didn’t linger, between cities. And half the time we were just flying to an airport anyway, since sneaking aboard a plane was still the fastest way to cover any distance larger than maybe fifty miles.

But as Thàn and I spotted the final landmark, and banked, and dove—as the world expanded at a hundred miles an hour—as the horizon shrank and the wind howled over my outstretched wings—

It was exhilarating. The freest I had ever felt, a sense of power and potency stronger than anything else—stronger even than being in Elfangor’s body, or the dinosaur’s, or the whale’s. To be able to move _that fast,_ and yet still be so totally in control—capable of snatching a running mouse out of tall grass, of going from a full dive to a complete stop in _seconds_ —

Under different circumstances, it might have been addictive. If—by some miracle—we actually _won_ this war, I might spend the rest of my life doing nothing else. Just living as a hawk, two hours at a time, watching the world from above, beholden to nothing and no one. Even just in bursts here and there, between harrowing missions, it was almost enough all by itself—almost enough to make it all worth it.

Not _really_ , of course. I mean, I’m not a monster. I know how to count to six hundred thousand.

But enough to cover _my_ suffering, at least. Enough to pay the costs that had landed on me, in particular, given that I hadn’t really lost all that much to begin with. It was an incredible technology, an incredible gift—the sort of thing that might make you believe in God, if it weren’t for all the rest of it.

_If only it worked past two hours. If only you could morph indefinitely—_

Would that have been enough, for the Yeerks? Would it have given them the freedom they needed, the variety of experience they craved? In that other, happier world, could that have been the solution to all of the problems?

 _Probably not, unless the individual shards could all morph on their own. What would be the point of being able to become_ one _animal for a few hours, when a pool can already become thousands of animals for days at a time?_

But then again, who was to say that the technology couldn’t be improved? Seerow—the inventor—Ax had told us he was dead, murdered during the Yeerk’s wild and bloody escape from their homeworld. But there were other brilliant Andalites, and other brilliant engineers in the galaxy. What could Thàn do, given an _Iscafil_ device and the time to tinker?

_While you’re at it, why not ask for a million dollars and a pony?_

Okay, fine—it was wishful thinking. We were at war, after all. All of the competent engineers were—or soon would be—hard at work either fueling or fending off an interstellar invasion. And it was probably the same among the Andalites, and every other race in this part of the galaxy—

For a second, I felt a rush of anger at the sheer _impatience_ of the Yeerks—at the way they’d rushed headlong into a war, without exploring any of the other options that—I imagined—they’d had available to them. At the loss of all the clever solutions that would never have time to mature, thanks to the time pressure that Visser Three had put us under.

But then I spotted Jake, and the anger passed. There was no point in wishing for a better world—this was the world we had, and we’d either make do or we wouldn’t.

‹Jake,› I said, flaring my wings and dropping down onto the sparse, scrubby forest floor. ‹This is Thàn Suoros, the guy I told you about.›

Still eerily silent, Thàn settled to the ground next to me. Jake nodded to him, and I noticed that he looked more tired than I’d ever seen him, his eyes flat and empty with dark circles underneath.

‹Garrett?› Jake asked privately, as Thàn and I began to demorph.

‹Stashing the cube,› I said, as my feathers began to lighten and run together like melted wax. Beside me, Thàn was growing, his human skeleton stretching inside of his bird skin. ‹He should be here before morning, unless there’s a snag with the Chee.›

‹How about this guy?› Jake said, shifting his gaze to Thàn. ‹You check him out?›

‹Morph check last night, seemed solid. He’s got a _hell_ of a lot of intel, plus a couple of new weapons. Takes initiative.›

‹What’s he know?›

‹Basically nothing yet. Wanted to check with you, first.›

Jake’s lip twisted a little bit, and his eyes flickered toward the horizon. ‹I don’t have much to say,› he said, the exhaustion plain in his voice. ‹You trust him, or not?›

I hesitated.

‹It’s fine either way,› Jake continued. ‹But I’m about to have to say a lot of things in a very small amount of time, and I need to know whether to loop him in or send him to go sit in a corner.›

A whisper tickled at the back of my mind, something Garrett had said yesterday.

_He wasn’t waiting for anyone else to save him._

‹We need him,› I said. ‹Loop him in.›

“Thàn,” Jake said aloud.

Thàn gave a garbled, inhuman reply.

“I’m going to talk to Tobias. You should eavesdrop. You’re going to be surprised by some of the things I say. Hold your questions until you’re sure they’re not stupid.”

Another garble, accompanied by a nod of his nightmarish, half-human head. Meanwhile, the parts of _me_ that were human started to thrum with adrenaline. Jake wasn’t normally this brusque, even with people he _knew—_ the last time I’d seen him like this was in the construction site, when I’d recruited Garrett without asking—

“The situation with Tyagi has gone off the rails,” he said bluntly. “First off, somebody figured out that David killed his dad—”

 _What,_ I wanted to say, but Jake had told Thàn to hold questions and anyway I didn’t exactly have a mouth yet—

“—or at least, he didn’t show up for his shift and they found a lot of blood and smashed furniture in his apartment. Rachel was first on scene, she got David out before anyone else showed up, took care of the body. When they found out, the base commander went to lock everything down, Ax and Marco’s dad went to leave, Tyagi didn’t let them, Marco threatened to go public about Paul Evans—”

_WHAT—_

“—eventually, Rachel got everybody calmed down, but basically the stalemate was between Tyagi saying that Marco’s dad was critical and we were clearly out of control, and Marco insisting that we couldn’t trust the system and she’d better not try to constrain our movements. Ax broke the stalemate by agreeing to stay, alone—they’ve got him in a tight-sealed room under active surveillance—and Marco got his dad out.”

“What—”

“Tom’s with Ax—on the outside, in thought-speak range, keeping in touch. That’s how we know—”

Jake broke off to scrub his fingers through his hair, the motion dull and mechanical, like a zombie. Beside me, Thàn finished demorphing and shrugged off his power pack. I did the same, the two clunky backpacks holding themselves upright on the forest floor.

“Ax did something when he set up his comm device,” Jake continued wearily. “Linked it to his escape pod’s computer somehow. He’s able to track all the communications that route through it. And at some point—”

He broke off again, seeming to hold back—what, fear? Anger? Fatigue? _Some_ kind of strong emotion, anyway—

“Tyagi must have morphed Ax. Morphed him and flipped the switch. Somebody contacted the Andalite homeworld, anyway, and Ax says they couldn’t’ve done it just by watching him or mimicking what he’d done. We don’t know what was said, because it was all private thought-speak and encrypted, but—according to Ax, they used the exact same procedure he’d followed a few hours earlier, and _then_ they spent another hour and a half trying to break into the Andalite civilian channels and failing.”

“So she knows—”

“That’s right.” Jake shifted his gaze from me to Thàn. “Thàn. Just so you’re on the same page. This guy Ax talked to, Lirem-Ar-something, he’s the bigwig in the Andalite military. Like, the Petraeus of the Yeerk-Andalite war. And yesterday he told Ax to bring him Visser Three’s head in three weeks or he’d hit the earth with a chunk of rock moving at about point nine five C.”

Thàn said nothing, his eyes widening a bit.

“Anyway, either she didn’t think to check the machine for Ax’s wiretap, or she doesn’t care if we listen in, because Ax was able to hear her follow-up call to Telor. They did, in fact, set up a rendezvous, and it’s only about seventy miles from here. Forty, from the base.”

“When?”

“In about eight hours. We’re not sure what the deal is—the call was short, and all she agreed to was that she would be there, with Ax and Marco’s dad and Temrash and Essak.” His eyes flickered toward Thàn. “Those’re the Yeerks in Ax and Marco’s dad's heads,” he added.

“What—have you—”

“We haven’t heard anything. Tyagi has got a burner phone she can use to call us, but she hasn’t yet. Hasn’t said anything to Ax directly. Hasn’t said anything where Tom could hear. Radio silence, since this morning.”

“What—”

“We don’t know. Marco’s off with his dad, he’s a little distracted, but he didn’t have a clue, either. Closest thing to options we came up with were one, _you_ could go try to talk to her directly, since she already knows you—”

_I wouldn’t put it that way—_

“—and two, we could head to the rendezvous point _now_ and try to settle into some kind of defensible position.”

“Against—”

“Against everybody, I guess.”

That last sentence was said with so much heaviness that almost without thinking I found myself resting a hand on Jake’s shoulder, despite the fact that we’d never been that sort of friends—

— _and that the last time you touched him you broke his nose._

“What—” I began, before hastily breaking off. Not ‘what,’ he’d already said he didn’t know, expecting him to have all the answers wasn’t fair—

“Where are the others?” I asked, starting over. “You said Ax and Tom are still at the base, and Marco—”

“Marco and his dad are around somewhere, talking it out. Rachel’s off with David, doing the same—”

Maybe I was imagining it, but I was pretty sure I could hear blame in his voice, and I winced. David had apparently _killed his father, what the fuck—_

— _well, the guy_ was _an abusive drunk asshole, if Rachel’s on his side it was probably self-defense—_

—which was Jake’s problem only because Rachel had extracted him, and Marco had vouched for him, and I had brought him on board in the first place.

“—they’re all due back by midnight, or we can text them if we need them.”

_And then at midnight…?_

I barely stopped myself from asking. “Okay. So. Uh.”

I glanced at Thàn. “Any questions?” I asked. “Or brilliant ideas?”

“I take it one of you is impersonating Tyagi in D.C.? Given that it sounds like she’s really at Edwards Air Force Base?”

“More or less,” I answered. “That was our solution to get her out of Washington after the Bug fighter crashed. We _think_ the Yeerks don’t—”

I stopped short mid-sentence, my throat suddenly dry.

I’m not sure what exactly connected the dots for me. Maybe it was just that I was looking at Thàn, who’d been observing everything and everyone for months—who was going to use his surveillance data to help us pin down the Yeerks. Or maybe it was Jake’s offhand comment about getting to the rendezvous point early. But either way, a chain reaction had gone off in my head, running through a series of thought-fragments like a fuse and ending with a single, explosive hypothesis.

_Yeerks—_

_Washington—_

_Impostor—_

_Security—_

_Surveillance—_

_Rendezvous—_

“Shit,” I said, and then mentally kicked myself.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said, forcing my voice toward nonchalance as I started morphing into myself as fast as I could. “Never mind. Just—overwhelming, that’s all.”

 _Shit. Shit. Shit._ I tried not to look up at the sky.

“Listen,” I said, trying to cover the awkward silence. “Priority number one has got to be the Andalite threat, right? Like—Ax, the Yeerks, Tyagi, that’s all important, but—we should be focusing on ways to stop them from launching the rock, right?”

Jake nodded tightly. “Marco and I talked about this earlier,” he said. “If we buy what Ax was saying, about that type of attack being unstoppable—”

He paused just long enough to whisper, in thought-speak: ‹Don’t mention the Chee.›

“—then we have to talk them out of it. Way I see it, there are three major lines of attack. First is the propaganda route, but it sounds like Tyagi already tried that and it doesn’t look like it worked—”

“Elfangor might be able to get through where Ax couldn’t,” I pointed out.

“Fair. We should look into that. The other two options are, find some way to end the war _now,_ or convincingly fake Visser Three’s death.”

“What about mad?” Thàn asked.

Jake raised an eyebrow.

“Mutually assured destruction,” Thàn explained. “The Cold War strategy. Are the Yeerks capable of launching a counterattack on the Andalite homeworld?”

Jake nodded slowly. “They should be,” he said. “According to Ax, all it really takes is a hyperdrive and knowledge of where your target’s going to be.”

“So the legitimacy of the threat might hinge on its own secrecy, right? This Lirem character told your Andalite ally, and _only_ your Andalite ally?”

Another nod.

“So, if the _Yeerks_ knew about it—and the Andalites knew that the Yeerks knew, and the Yeerks knew that the Andalites knew that the Yeerks knew—that would be the end of it, right? Otherwise they’re facing an escalating cycle of revenge.”

Jake frowned. “Maybe? If they’re desperate enough, though—they _also_ have the Yeerk homeworld on lockdown, and Elfangor made it sound like the Earth really might be enough to tip the whole balance—”

‹More importantly for right _now_ , though,› I cut in, speaking in thought-speak to both of them, ‹is that I’m pretty sure we’re being watched.›

“Wh—” Jake began, before cutting himself off. ‹What?›

Thàn’s eyes widened again as he looked back and forth between us.

‹I realized about thirty seconds ago,› I said. ‹I was thinking about what you said, about getting over to the rendezvous point early, but then I thought, they _definitely_ have it under surveillance already, humans and Yeerks both, and then I figured—›

‹She knows we can’t be far from the base,› Jake said, horror dawning across his face.

‹And most of this area is open desert, and it’s one of the most high-tech facilities on the planet, _plus_ it’s housing a Bug fighter and the President—›

That was why Tyagi hadn’t contacted us about the rendezvous, even though she would need Marco’s dad—and therefore, presumably, our cooperation—she knew right where Marco’s dad was, and could pick him up any time.

‹—they’ve got to be watching every square inch of the surrounding hundred miles by satellite, right? I mean, if border patrol can pick up illegal immigrants—›

‹All right. You don’t think— _crap.›_

‹What?› I asked.

‹D’you think the _Yeerks_ have eyes on us? Or on Tyagi?›

“Not…yet,” Thàn said, speaking slowly, as if vetting each word before it came out. “But Edwards—I suppose it’s too much to hope you know the phrase ‘Schelling point’?”

We shook our heads.

“If…rendezvous…there…Edwards…obvious…”

‹Got it,› Jake said. ‹They have no reason to believe Tyagi is here _now_ , but given that she set a rendezvous seventy miles from here, it’s the obvious place to look in, oh, say, about six hours, if you want to spring a trap of some kind. That right?›

Thàn nodded.

‹So what do we do?› I asked. ‹I mean—›

‹Can they read text messages?› Jake asked. ‹Without a wiretap, I mean. Can they just—snatch them out of the air.›

I shrugged, and we both looked at Thàn, who held up his hands. “Don’t look at _me,_ ” he said.

‹Can’t be helped,› I said. ‹Worst thing that’ll happen is what’s going to happen in a few hours anyway, right?›

‹If you’re right about this,› Jake said, but he was already pulling out his phone.

‹What’s the rendezvous going to be?› I asked.

‹McDonald’s on Mojave,› he said. ‹That was our fallback from earlier. Actually, no, wait—cameras. The Mojave elementary school.›

‹How far is that?›

‹About twenty-five miles from Edwards. Still time to get to the rendezvous if we decide to go.›

I pulled out my own phone to send an update to Garrett, then hesitated. ‹Thàn doesn’t have any morphs that are small and fast enough,› I said. ‹Neither does David, I don’t think. And Marco’s dad can’t morph at all—›

‹On it. We’ll pull people in.› He held up his phone. ‹‘Urgent,’› he read. ‹’Being watched by sat. Morph small/fast, take those with no small/fast along, demorph/remorph under cover, head to Mojave elementary 25mi WNW of EFB. Stay low, wait for signal. Go NOW.’› Lowering the phone, he looked me straight in the eye. ‹Demorphing now. Once I send this, we’re on the clock, too. Ninety seconds. You sure we’re not overreacting here?›

‹You’re the people person,› I said. ‹Tell me I’m wrong?›

He bit his lip, then shook his head.

‹Okay. I’ll take these two backpack looking things, and Tobias, you can take Thàn. I’ll go northeast, you go southwest—›

‹Hang on,› I said, halting my demorph. ‹Other way around. Jake take Thàn, leave both proton packs with me.›

‹What—›

‹I’ve got a hunch. I’m going to stick around for a couple of extra minutes, and then I’ll follow.›

‹You—›

His thought-speak cut out as he crossed the invisible border between his morph armor and his real body. “Sure?” he asked aloud.

‹No,› I said. ‹But better me than you. I just realized—what if it’s not satellites? What if Nickerson’s out here watching us, or even just some regular Marines? Plus, it’s less suspicious if we’re not all vanishing at once.›

I watched as Jake’s eyes refused to dart around, as he kept them focused on me. “Fine,” he said tightly. Stepping forward, he grabbed Thàn’s arm, and closed his eyes.

‹He’s taking you into his morph,› I explained. ‹It’s weird, but it’s not dangerous. You’ll go unconscious once your head disappears.›

“So, this is just what it’s like around here, huh?” Thàn murmured, as Jake began to shrink and melt and Thàn’s shoulder began to go with him.

‹Not always,› I answered silently. ‹Sometimes, we can actually _see_ the people we’re fighting against.›

 

*        *        *

 

‹Sergeant Nickerson?› I called out, once Jake and Thàn were gone. I was sitting on the forest floor, leaning back against the two proton packs and resisting the urge to keep looking over my shoulder.

‹Sergeant Nickerson, it’s Tobias. I’d love to talk, if that’s okay with you.›

No answer.

‹Anyone, then?› I said, broadening my thought-speak band. ‹Anyone out there with Edwards Air Force Base?›

Silence.

‹Look, I’m going to stick around for another minute or two, but then I plan to disappear, and I _don’t_ plan to make it easy for you to find me again. So unless you want to shoot me with a tranquilizer after I turn into a bird—›

“Sir.”

I didn’t jump, but only barely. The voice had come from behind me, and I stood—slowly—keeping my hands in plain sight.

“Hi,” I said, as I turned around to see two soldiers dressed in desert fatigues, helmets pulled low, M16s held ready but not _quite_ pointed at me. “My name’s—”

“Tobias. Sir. We know.”

I waited, but the soldier didn’t say anything else. “Uh. Take me to your leader?”

The two soldiers exchanged glances. “What are those devices, sir?”

“Weapons. Light weapons—anti-personnel only. Like a wide-angle laser.”

“Please step away.”

I stepped.

The soldier reached for a walkie-talkie attached to his collar. “López,” he said. “Williams. Stay here, stay in touch—we’ll get a tech squad out ASAP.” There was a click of acknowledgement, and he released the walkie-talkie and turned back to me. “Sir. You wanted to talk?”

“To T—”

I paused. I wasn’t sure how tightly controlled Tyagi’s secret was, but it seemed at least _possible_ that these soldiers didn’t know, and there was no reason to change that. “To your commanding officer, if you don’t mind.”

“Concerning?”

“These weapons, for one. Also, a new source of intel about Yeerk movements.”

There was the sound of soft footsteps off to the side, and I turned to see another pair of soldiers emerging from the sparse trees. “Confirmed, the others are all gone,” one of them said. “Horus attempting to reacquire.”

The first soldier—I couldn’t quite make out his name badge, but it looked like it probably said Smith—nodded, then turned back toward me. “Sir. If you’ll come with us, please, and—ah—please don’t turn into anything else.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Tobias Yastek.”

“Madam President.”

“You wanted to speak with me?”

It had only taken forty-five minutes to make it through eight layers of authority. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who wanted to talk.

“Yes, Madam President.”

“About?”

“Three things. Well, four, if you count the two weapons your soldiers picked up, but those are mostly a gift and they’re pretty straightforward. I’m betting it’ll be about thirty minutes before your engineers understand them better than I do.”

“What are they?”

“Early proto versions of alien beam weapons, built by—a scientist.”

“This Tom person you arrived with?”

I hesitated for the tiniest fraction of a second. “Yes.”

“Sit.”

I settled back into my chair, looking nervously around the room. It was a standard sort of interrogation chamber, just like the ones I’d seen in hundreds of movies. There was the gray concrete, the metal table, the harsh blue light, the giant two-way mirror on the wall. They hadn’t handcuffed me or chained me down or anything, but the four drones hovering quietly in the corners by the ceiling each had a menacing-looking cylinder pointed straight at my head—a cylinder that tracked me when I moved as little as an inch.

My last interrogator had left only a few minutes before President Tyagi arrived. She stayed standing as I scooted my chair forward with a metallic shriek, her arms crossed, her eyes sharp and bright.

“Three things,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s the third one?”

I blinked. “Uh,” I stammered. “They’re not exactly in order.”

“Which one are you most scared about bringing up?”

I swallowed.

It was funny. I had pretty much zero respect for authority, and had faced down teachers and doctors and cops and judges and bullies all my life. And in the past couple of months, I had faced death at least a dozen times—death by laser beam, by spaceship crash, by bullet, by alien claw, by suffocation, by frigging _giant squid._ I’d been transformed, and teleported, and seen an alien god freeze time.

And _still_ I had the jitters.

The last time we’d met, she’d been almost completely focused on Paul Evans—on him, and on the bigger picture, on making a plan. But now, I was the subject of one hundred percent of the attention of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and I could feel every single one of the years she had on me, and every single scrap of authority I lacked. For the first time, I was starting to understand why even the people who’d absolutely _hated_ Obama and Trump had nevertheless been polite and respectful when they met face-to-face.

_The hovering death robots probably have a little to do with it, too._

“If—ah—if the stuff I have to say is pretty secret—”

‹Then don’t say it out loud.›

I jerked. I hadn’t expected her to have morph armor.

“I’m not—uh—”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Just a minute,” I said, and focused, my cheeks burning.

I had demorphed once they’d stashed me in the room, thinking that if I _did_ need to take any sort of drastic action, it would be better to be ninety seconds away from a Cape buffalo than to be three minutes away. There was also the fact that acquiring—and the acquiring trance—only worked in your real body.

‹The part I’m _most_ scared of bringing up, Madam President, is the death threat that the Andalites made.›

‹The death threat that your compatriot Aximili chose _not_ to tell us about,› she said sharply.

‹He told _us,_ › I countered. ‹As adapted to the circumstances, I think that’s entirely fair. It’s not like he kept it from the human race—he just told his teammates instead of a stranger.›

‹Same criticism, then, only this time of human _children_ who ought to _know better._ ›

I frowned, some unspoken objection tickling at the back of my mind. ‹I’m sorry, Madam President—aren’t we all on the same side, here?›

She took in a long breath through her nose, her nostrils flaring. ‹Your _teammates_ entered this base and _murdered_ one of my top advisors!› she said, just one notch shy of shouting.

I winced. ‹I—Madam President, I don’t know much about that. I just got in from—from the east coast, and I only got the quick version before showing up here. But—ma’am—I’ve _been_ Jeremiah Poznanski. I’ve been inside his head. I don’t know if you know the sorts of things bad parents do to their children, but—›

I hesitated. ‹Madam President, imagine it was you. Imagine being young, and helpless, and they keep getting drunk, and they hit you, and they hit you, and they _hit_ you, and then suddenly you—somebody hands you a loaded gun, and you’re _twelve_ , and they come at you again, and you just—›

I broke off again. ‹If it were _you,_ Madam President—can’t you see that you might run? That you might _not_ trust, that—that if you turned yourself in, that everything would be okay?›

‹The rest of you should know better. You’re colluding to keep this _minor_ out of the hands of the authorities. And as for the wrongs Jeremiah may or may not have done to him, it was _you_ who paraded him on stage during your broadcast—›

‹We had to starve the Yeerk out of him one way or another—›

‹The broadcast was irresponsible, not to mention _unilateral_ —›

‹You _knew_ about it! Sergeant Nickerson came from Paul!›

‹—an act of overt terrorism on United States soil—›

‹—we didn’t hurt _anybody_ at that factory—›

‹—not to mention that you have unleashed _hundreds_ of superpowered individuals into the _general population—_ ›

‹Madam President.›

She paused, looking down at me, her face carved from stone.

‹Madam President—›

I had to swallow three times before I could force the words out, even in thought-speak. ‹Madam President, I’m not here to be lectured. And—I bet you’re not here to lecture me, either.›

For a split second, her eyes were Dracon beams. But then—

‹Yes. You’re right. But _you_ have to understand that your actions are _not without consequences._ You are a _child,_ Tobias. Your friends are children. Your actions—they have been reckless, and they have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands—›

‹That isn’t f—›

‹— _and they may cost the lives of seven billion if you do not come into the fold.›_

I blinked. ‹The—fold?›

‹Yes. Give up your sources, give up your technology, rejoin the larger human race. Stop fighting this fight alone and unaccountable.›

‹Madam President—›

I took in a deep breath. ‹Madam President, am I to understand that you would allow us to _keep_ fighting? That you would fold us into the existing command structure?›

‹Yes. Absolutely. You have perspective, you have experience—we would be fools not to take advantage of it.›

I paused, suddenly feeling like I was stumbling through a pitch-dark room where the walls were made of razors. ‹I—um—sorry. Give me a minute?›

She said nothing, made no movement—just looked at me.

_Okay. So—_

She could just be outright lying, for one. _Probably_ was lying, actually—from her perspective, she was justified in saying just about _anything_ to get access to Ax, the cube, Essak, and everything we knew or suspected about the bigger picture, and once she _had_ us she had basically no reason not to keep us under lock and key while the grownups took care of business.

_Would that be so bad?_

I mean, it wasn’t bad for grownups to be taking care of business _too_ —that was the whole point behind the broadcast, and behind me and Garrett doing our recruiting runs.

But if we were taken out of the picture...if there was no more _reason_ for them to listen to us, except when they happened to _feel like it_ …

 _I do not know the future_ , Elfangor had said, the words burned into my memory like a brand. _But I have seen its broader strokes, and can rank possibility far more finely than you would credit. This meeting was not by chance, and if there are few paths to victory, at least be assured that you walk upon the widest._

The problem was, everything Elfangor had said was just as compatible with us teaming up with the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES as it was with us continuing to strike out on our own. Even if he was right, and we _did_ have some kind of actual, important destiny—what was to stop _this_ from being _it?_

_The Ellimist? The Chee?_

Tyagi cleared her throat.

‹I’m sorry, Madam President,› I said. ‹I’m not authorized to make a decision like that, and even if I were, I’m pretty sure it would have to be ‘no.’ The U.S. military is just too big and too easy of a target. It’s going to be the _first_ thing that the Yeerks compromise or destroy once they start moving again.›

‹Unless we convince them _not_ to start moving again,› Tyagi snapped. ‹Unless we sue for peace—a suit that you so-called ‘Animorphs’ might scuttle before it ever has a chance!›

‹Sue for peace?› I repeated. ‹Why would they accept any kind of settlement when they have the upper hand in—in— _everything?›_

‹Not just a settlement,› she said. ‹An alliance.›

I felt my jaw drop open.

‹The Andalite threat,› she continued, her mental voice hot and tightly controlled. ‹My science advisors confirmed what Aximili had to say—it is plausible, it is real, there is _nothing_ we can do to stop it. Even if we were to successfully assassinate the Visser, what’s to stop them from saying ‘thanks’ and then wiping us out anyway? If Paul’s account of what happened in the construction site is accurate, they’ve already threatened to do it once before.›

She leaned forward, placing both of her fists knuckle-down on the table, looming over me. ‹There is no guarantee that we can turn the tide through propaganda,› she said. ‹Even if we could access their civilian communications, they are pressed on all sides and _frightened._ They might flip the switch out of sheer panic. The _only_ possible safeguard is mutually assured destruction, and the only way to secure _that_ is through the Yeerks.

‹You’re going to tell them,› I said, the words as much for my own benefit as for hers.

‹Yes.›

‹What’s to stop them from—from _strip mining_ us? From taking as many humans as they can, and just _leaving?›_

‹Nothing at all,› Tyagi replied grimly. ‹But then at least the maximum possible number of humans will have been saved. And better for us to enter into a partnership _willingly,_ and gain as many concessions as we can, than to simply be slaves forever.›

She straightened and began pacing, her eyes flitting back and forth between nothing and nowhere. ‹The tide was _turning_ in Ventura,› she said. ‹The Visser may have spun that up out of sheer cynical manipulation, but it was _true._ We have evidence to support it. They were learning from us—they were becoming more _like_ us.›

She turned back to me. ‹But that process takes _time._ And it has to happen _now_ —before a generation of slaves grows up not knowing any better—perhaps literally incapable of thinking it should be any other way.›

‹I—›

I didn’t know what to say.

‹I’m going to offer them an exchange,› she said. ‹If they promise to publicly commit to mutually assured destruction with the Andalites, then I will publicly push for the freedom to voluntarily incorporate. A voluntary infestation program—if not in the United States itself, then at least with U.S. backing and U.S. support.›

She fixed me with a glare. ‹But in order to take _that_ step, we need to establish credibility first. Begin a true dialogue, open reliable channels. That means we need to follow through on the promise to return Essak, and possibly Temrash—›

‹Temrash is all that’s keeping Ax from losing his mind,› I interjected. ‹You can’t just—›

‹If I don’t have Peter Levy, I very much _will,›_ Tyagi said. ‹In fact, I might simply _give_ them Aximili, if that’s what it takes to _save the entire planet from destruction._ Since, I assume, you still aren’t interested in turning over the morphing cube so that we can get to work on duplicating it.›

The objection that had been growing in the back of my mind finally snapped into focus, found words to express itself. ‹You’re acting as if the entire Yeerk species is like Temrash and Essak and Aftran,› I bit out. ‹You’re acting like—like they’re _reasonable,_ like we _understand_ them, like we’ve figured out how their morality works. And you’re _forgetting the Visser.›_

‹I am _not,›_ she snapped, and for a moment my objection wanted to run and hide. ‹But sometimes you must make _compromises,_ and a credible threat to the entire planet is one of those times. I am _aware_ that the Visser killed six hundred thousand of my citizens. But _your_ Andalites are threatening to kill us _all._ Between that and the Visser, I’ll take the Visser.›

This time, it was my own memory that floated up, unbidden—my own words I heard echoing in my head.

_Maybe a few billion dead humans is exactly what the galaxy needs._

I could see it—the path forward, one forced move after another, first this concession, then the next, then the next, always with the threat of extinction held up against the cost of cooperation. And I could see where it would end—the same place it _always_ ended, unless some greater, outside force intervened—with the tyrant getting everything he wanted, and the victim losing everything he had.

_Some greater, outside force—_

No. Now was _not_ the time to start trusting in the gods that had been willing to let Garrett die for _nothing._

Jake. I needed Jake, and Marco—needed to talk this through with them, formulate a plan—a response. We needed to be at this rendezvous, and we needed to be ready.

For—

For—

‹You said you had two other things to say?› Tyagi asked. ‹We’re under a bit of time pressure, here, if you hadn’t noticed.›

‹We—you already—sort of covered one of them, Madam President,› I said weakly. ‹Ah—the last one—I mean, the first one—›

I trailed off, shaking my head to clear away some of the shock and confusion. ‹We’ve encountered a new source of intel,› I said. ‹It provides data on the location and movements of every Yeerk force in the system.›

‹ _What?›_

‹Every ship, every communication, with a record stretching back to January. You could know where the Bug fighters are at all times, send nukes up to the mothership—anything you wanted. Advance warning of how many ships are showing up to this rendezvous, for instance.›

Tyagi blinked, and behind her eyes I could see her thoughts churning at a hundred miles per hour.

‹Also—this intel tells us they have a base camp on Mars, and—›

— _gamble—_

‹—a cache of useful supplies in the water between the larger and smaller islands of Saint Matthews, in Alaska.›

Tyagi’s eyes narrowed.

‹It’s the same source of intel that built the weapons,› I added. ‹In case you want—I dunno—proof of quality, or whatever. Madam President.›

There was a long and pregnant silence, broken only by the quiet hum of the death drones in the corners of the room.

‹Control over this source of intel,› Tyagi said abruptly. ‹And Peter Levy comes to the rendezvous. In exchange, Aximili is free to go, and we don’t pursue David Poznanski.›

_I’m not authorized to agree to that, either._

—was what I was _supposed_ to say. But then again—

_The sort of person who does the right thing, even if it’s hard._

Thàn Suoros wasn’t a part of our team. Not yet. And he wasn’t _trying_ to be, either—not like David. If he could do the most good here, as a part of the U.S. machine—

He would want to.

And Jake would agree to it—if I told him it was the best option.

 _But can you trust_ her?

I looked up into her eyes again—the eyes of a general, or a warlord, or an oracle.

‹Okay, Madam President. It’s a deal.›

 

*        *        *

 

‹You’re _sure_ none of them followed you?›

‹I mean, no—I’m not _certain._ But we went under sky cover like four different times, and I don’t see any random birds around.›

Or random _anything,_ really. It was fully dark out, and the lizard morph I was wearing didn’t see so well at night. But it was cold-blooded, which meant if anyone was trying to track me with heat-seeking technology, they had their work cut out for them.

The others were similarly invisible, scattered around the area in God-knows-what morphs, all undercover, all in thought-speak range. The only exception was Marco’s dad, who had donned a wig and an unlit cigarette and was circling the block, guarded by Marco in some unknown form that, he said, was perfectly capable of firing a shredder accurately.

‹All right. What happened?›

I filled them in in broad strokes as quickly as I could.

‹Marco here. Did they say anything about security at this rendezvous?›

‹I wasn’t exactly in a position to ask. Once she agreed to let Ax out, we just booked it.›

‹Should I even _be_ here for this?›

‹Who’s that?›

‹Oh, sorry—it’s Thàn. I just—I mean, if you guys are about to make a whole bunch of secret plans, should I just—go?›

‹Jake here. Are you down with heading in? You don’t have to go, if you don’t want to.›

‹No, Tobias made the right call. I’ll just—before I go, I’ll demorph and give you guys the Marauder’s Map. I’ll—uh—I’ll leave it under one of the picnic tables.›

‹The what?›

‹Oh, come _on,›_ said a voice, and even in thought-speak I could tell it was Rachel. ‹It’s obviously going to be a tablet or something that lets us look at the Serenity data.›

‹Bingo.›

‹Was that—›

‹Thàn again, sorry. You know, you guys should _really_ use radio norms—›

‹We know. Says Marco. Back to business—are we excluding Thàn from this conversation or not? Over.›

Silence.

Or maybe a private exchange between Marco and Jake—

‹Thàn. Head out. Thanks for everything, and if this doesn’t blow up in everyone’s faces, we’ll try to be in touch. Over.›

‹Roger that.›

I skittered to the edge of the rooftop, hoping to see a bird take flight or a dog go running or something, but nothing caught my eye.

‹All right. Who’s got stuff to say?›

‹Chee,› I put in.

‹What about them?›

‹What are we doing with regards to telling them or not?›

‹They’ll find out soon enough, won’t they?›

‹Do we think it’ll matter to them that we didn’t tell them ourselves?›

‹Can we even _trust_ them right now? What with Visser Three’s dog bullshit?›

‹We don’t know if that’ll have any kind of effect on them. We don’t even know if they _know_ about it yet.›

‹Come on, _we_ noticed and _they_ didn’t? Puh-lease.›

‹What’s a Chee?›

‹Indestructible non-violent dog robots from the year ten thousand B.C.›

‹What—›

‹That’s a legit summary, we’ll explain the rest later.›

‹You know, I just sent Garrett to them _this morning_ ,› I said, trying to control my rising swell of anxiety. ‹If we were having reservations that were this strong, I like to think somebody would’ve said something sooner. Also, can we _please_ say who’s talking? I have no idea what’s going on, over.›

‹Jake here. Do it. Over.›

‹Rachel. Are we telling the Chee what’s going on, or not? I vote yes, if the Yeerks are about to find out anyway. Over.›

‹Marco. I agree. At the very least, it gives us a chance to ask if they can do anything to shield the Earth, which they probably can’t but we’d sure feel dumb for not even _checking._ Over.›

There was a long pause.

‹David here. Um. Hi. If—uh—if this—plan—doesn’t work. If the Andalites go through with it. What—um—what are we going to do?›

Another pause.

‹Over. Sorry.›

‹Marco here. We spend our last few days having fun, and then we die. Over.›

‹Tom. What about getting off planet?›

Another silence, this time one that didn’t just feel like someone had forgotten to say _over._

‹I mean, there are ships—right?› Tom continued. ‹There’s a whole galaxy out there. Do we—I mean, would we want to—to try to—you know.›

Tom’s thoughts faltered and gave out. ‹Over,› he said at last, in barely more than a whisper.

‹Tobias here—› I began, before someone cut me off.

‹No. I mean—sorry, Tobias. This is Jake. Just—um—wait a bit, okay? Let everybody think for themselves first.›

I felt a quick snap of frustration, but it faded almost immediately, replaced by the realization that _I_ hadn’t actually thought it through myself—that I’d been about to answer out of reflex rather than reflection.

 _What’s the_ right _answer?_ I wondered.

What would Garrett do?

_You mean, what would Garrett do as he tried to figure out how to live up to the fake version of you that he idolizes?_

Sure, whatever, if I wanted to be cynical as fuck about it. More like, what would Garrett do if he’d grown up in a world where right and wrong actually mattered—actually existed?

Phrased like that, the answer was immediately clear:

_You don’t save yourself until you’ve saved everyone else._

Even at the cost of the survival of the human species?

 _But it’s_ not _the survival of the human species. Like Tyagi said, the Yeerks will save as many humans as they can, with or without our help. They’ve probably_ already _exported a bunch of humans without us even noticing—there’s a colony on Mars, remember?_

But those humans would all be trapped. Slaves. Unable to free themselves—

 _Sure, talk yourself into it. But are you really going to pretend that there’s no better, more effective way to set up emancipation than that? Is your direct, personal involvement really the_ most _likely path to a better future, given a bunch of Controllers fleeing an exploding Earth?_

Well, there _had_ been a prophecy—

_No. What there was was a dickhead alien pushing everybody else around like pawns. There’s no such thing as prophecies, just people making shit happen or not._

I squeezed my eyes shut.

_All right, fine._

When you put it that way…

There was no reason for us _in particular_ to be the ones getting saved. There was _maybe_ an argument for Ax, as the first ever voluntary, cooperative Andalite-Yeerk alliance. But the rest of us were not special—we weren’t even the only morphers, anymore.

‹Tobias here,› I said, and then paused in case anyone had an objection.

No one spoke. ‹I vote no. If the ship goes down, we go down with it. Over.›

‹Tom. I’ll stay if everyone else is staying. Over.›

‹Rachel. I think—if we have an exit strategy—if we can tell ourselves, it’s okay, _we’re_ safe, no matter what—I think that we won’t—won’t try as hard. We’ll want to, we’ll think we are, but we won’t quite. Over.›

‹David here,› said David, sounding slightly panicked. ‹Hang on, is this turning into a _voting_ thing? Over.›

‹Jake here. Not a vote. A discussion. Over.›

‹A discussion about whether we should all have a _suicide pact?_ Over.›

‹David—›

‹I didn’t sign up for this!›

‹Neither did the seven billion _other_ people who’re going to die if we can’t stop this,› I broke in. ‹We’re trying to save _everyone._ We’re _trying_ to make it so _no one_ has to die. Over.›

‹But in the meantime, if we can’t stop it, we’re just going to—what, _not_ escape?›

‹Rachel here. David, it’s not like we have ships just lying around. Over.›

‹ _They_ have ships! The Yeerks, and those military guys, too! Why don’t we steal one?›

‹Where would you even go?›

‹ _I_ don’t know. Somewhere where they aren’t throwing frigging planets around?›

‹David, this is Jake. Calm down, okay? We don’t have to decide this right now, and we’re not going to make a final call without giving you a chance to say your piece—›

‹I don’t have a _piece,_ I just don’t want to _die—_ ›

‹Jake’s right. Uh, says Marco. We’ve got more important stuff to talk about, like the interstellar parlay that’s happening in—what—a little under six hours? Over.›

‹Tom here. Are we going? Over.›

‹Marco. My dad says he’s definitely going, over. Or—crap, sorry—that means I’m going, too. Over for real.›

‹Aximili. I, too, would like to go. And it may be that I can be of some value in the conversation. Over.›

‹Jake here. I’ll be present. Over.›

‹Rachel. I’m going to hang back, talk with—I’m going to sit this one out. Over.›

‹Jake again. Rachel’s in the reserves. Tom? Tobias? In or out? Over.›

‹Tom. I’ll go reserves, if you guys don’t mind. It sounds like—with Essak—I don’t want to get anywhere near another infestation site. Over.›

‹Jake. Roger that. Rachel, you can handle the map thing that Thàn left, and keep us up to date if anything looks funny? Over.›

‹Roger.›

If I’d been in human form, I would have bitten my lip. I _wanted_ to hang back—to be there when Garrett finally got in, to make sure he made it back. But after talking with Tyagi earlier, and Thàn before that—

‹Tobias here. I’m in, over.›

_God dammit, Garrett. You’d better fucking be okay._


	41. Interlude 11

**Interlude**

 

**ALIEN PAPERWEIGHTS: PLASTIC DRACON AND A LITE BLUE BOX**

Item condition: Used (originally found in a construction site)

Description: plastic dragon is nothing special, just the usual thing form the kind of story that has like a princess and a dwarf and an elf an gore and magic and stuff. blue box is where its at, got all kinds of cool symbols and markings on it like alien language, and glows when you tap it (takes double a batteries not included). its out of this world!

Time left: 21 days 4 hours (Wednesday 12:00PM)

Current bid: $49.00

Click here to contact seller


	42. Chapter 31: Jake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone. Sorry it's been so long between updates—work at CFAR has continued to be time-consuming, and in addition I've started an ambitious group house, published a set of 30 rationality essays on the new LessWrong, started official work on my kids' rationality bootcamp thanks to a grant from CEA, and generally been running around in need of a Time Turner, a clone, and a Time Turner for the clone.
> 
> I'm on vacation for the next eight days, though, so there's a chance I'll actually manage to squeeze in one or two updates before December 31st. Next chapter is Marco, followed by Rachel.
> 
> By the way, I know I don't really deserve it, since the updates have been super spotty, but if you have the time to leave a comment or a review, I'd particularly appreciate it this month. If you model me as feeling pretty much exactly like [the tone of this chapter], you won't be far off. As always, your words are a treasure (including the negative ones, so long as they're constructive), and they keep me going.
> 
> LAST BUT NOT LEAST: the "CouteauBleu interlude," Interlude 10, has finally been updated and polished into its final form. You won't lose much if you skip the reread (no major plot changes) but I do believe it's stronger than it was, thanks to Couteau's help.
> 
> Happy reading!

 

**Chapter 31: Jake**

‹I—what— _Jake?›_

I felt the ripple of shock pass through her, the scrambling confusion like slipping on ice.

‹Jake—is that _you?›_

‹Yes,› I answered.

Her disorientation deepened as she reached for her muscles, her eyes, and found the way blocked, her body still and unresponsive.  I said nothing, an odd reluctance tugging at the back of my mind, an unsympathetic unwillingness to help as she struggled to put together the pieces.

‹Wha—where am—what’s going— _what?›_

‹You’re a morph, Cassie.›

I watched as the words produced a rush of understanding, followed—as always—by a spike of sickly fear.

_Here it comes._

‹Am I—›

‹Yes,› I said bluntly.

I was being callous, cruel— _noticed_ myself being cruel, and yet had no energy to spare to walk it back.  Inside our shared head, the copy of Cassie withered, buckling beneath the weight of the revelation.  I felt her despair as it welled up, thick and sticky and black—watched the frantic tumble of her thoughts as she searched desperately for words that she would allow herself to hear, to think, to say.

But on my end—

Only impatience.

Not the kind of impatience that motivates you to speed things along.  Not the kind that makes you want to help.  The kind that’s made up mostly of judgment, of annoyance—of waiting for the other person to screw up, to justify the contempt you’re already feeling.  We’d been here fifty-four times before, the two of us, and the cut scene—

The cut scene just wasn’t doing anything for me anymore.

‹My parents—›

‹We don’t know,› I said, cutting her off again.  ‹Supposedly in Washington.  But they were dropped off by Visser Three, as bait, and we don’t know what shape they’re in, and we can’t afford to go get them out.›

She flinched—shrank—curled inward on herself like a kicked puppy, and even through my exhaustion I felt myself responding, felt a flicker of sympathy and remorse—

_Oh, please._

The voice was Marco’s—Marco at his coldest, Marco as I imagined him when I thought about the future, about what he would be like if this went on for another year, the last shreds of humanity burned away, leaving only a skeleton of iron resolve.

It was there to protect me, that voice.  To remind me that it made no difference, in the end.  That whether I helped or not, comforted her or not—whether she recovered from the blows I was giving her or just collapsed entirely—that either way, this version of Cassie had less than an hour to live.  Then I would shove her back, like I always did—back down into oblivion, into nothingness, into un-being. 

I had done it before, after all.  Fifty-four times, since that first night after Ventura.  And after fifty-four times—it would have horrified me, if someone had told me six months ago, but after _fifty-four times—_

There was a part of me that was _curious._

That wanted to see.

How she would react.

To see if anything would be different, if I said nothing.  If I wasn’t kind.  Wanted to see how she would make sense of it—how she would fit it into her eternal, unchanging impression of me.

I wouldn’t have done it _just_ from curiosity.  Or at least, that’s what I told myself.  But I was so very, very tired, and with every morph she seemed less and less like a real person, and in the end, it was just— _easier—_ not to care.  I hated myself for it, but it was a token, halfhearted hatred, too thin to use as fuel.

‹Was it bad?› she asked quietly.

I could feel her rallying, under the surface—twisting out from under the pain, looking for something else to latch onto, something to distract herself.

‹It was quick,› I said.  ‹There was a mission—to the Yeerk pool.  And—›

I imagined explaining it all over again, as I had so many times before—the god, the meteor, the Bug fighter, the broadcast—

‹—there was a fire.  You went back to try to save some of the people in the cages.  And then the Yeerks blew everything up.›

She was firming up, as the words sank in.  Recovering.  Straightening.  Hardening.  A ray of quiet pride cut through the despair, bright and golden, and her shock began to melt as a low glow of warmth and concern kindled underneath.

‹Is everyone else—›

I broke in, cutting her off.  ‹Cassie, I need to ask you something.›

The shift was instantaneous, frictionless, total.  It was too fast for words, but if there _had_ been words—

 _Jake is hurting,_ some part of her had decided.  _Must_ be hurting, or I wouldn’t be so short, so brusque, so cold.

I was hurting, the copy of Cassie thought, and that meant she had a job to do.

‹What’s up, buttercup?› she asked, her tone a deliberate balance between casual and concerned.

And just like that, we were back on script.  Back to the Cassie of yesteryear, the Cassie who never grew, never changed.  A Cassie who’d never made it to the mesa, who hadn’t lived long enough to choke on the ashes of Ventura, who didn’t remember slaughtering a bear just because she couldn’t keep it all inside any longer.  A Cassie who honestly thought she might be a terrible person because once in a while she only did the right thing _reluctantly._

(In the back of my head, Marco’s laughter echoed, dark and empty and cold as deep space.)

I could still see her fear and hurt, writhing beneath the surface like a live electrical wire, but they were under control now.  Deprioritized.  Set aside, along with her confusion and disorientation.  The mere fact of it set my teeth on edge, started a slow boil in my blood, and it took a long moment for me to understand _why—_

That was how she’d gotten herself killed in the first place.

Not by being _generically_ stupid, but by _actively not thinking._   By _retreating_ from reality, running backwards from a thorny, confusing, impossible situation until she found something simple and straightforward—something unambiguously good, according to her own private moral code.  By dodging the hard question, and replacing it with something clear and actionable, even at the cost of her own life—

I hated it.  Hated _her_ , in that moment—for abandoning us, for deserting, for cheating and tagging out while we still needed her.  For leaving _us_ to deal with the real problems, while she went off and satisfied some selfish need to feel good about herself, for putting herself _first—_

_You mean like when a certain fearless leader charged straight ahead into the Yeerk pool and got himself killed?_

‹…Jake?›

‹There’s a meeting,› I said abruptly.  ‹In about four hours.  Out in the desert.  President Tyagi, and Telor, they’re planning to make a deal—›

‹Who?›

I felt a surge of hot anger, drowned it in a wave of ice.  ‹The next highest Yeerk under Visser Three,› I lied, reaching for the simplest possible explanation.  ‹They’re maybe interested in—in mutinying, and there’s a decent chance we might be able to strike a deal—›

I faltered, unable to get my thoughts into an order that the copy of Cassie would understand.  Essak and Marco’s dad, Temrash and Ax, the kid David and his dead father, the missions Tobias had been running to Tyagi and Paul Evans and Thàn Suoros, the Andalite Chancellor’s threat and the President’s plan to turn the war cold again—at the cost of humanity’s independence—and our half-dozen half-baked ideas on how to assassinate Visser Three—

Hell, this version of Cassie didn’t even know about the _Chee._

‹There are a lot of moving parts,› I said.  ‹Point is, we have a shot at peace—›

—Cassie’s heart swelled with emotion, and I felt a corresponding wash of disdain, followed by an echo of self-recrimination that managed to be just a little bit too small—

‹—real, actual peace, but only if the Yeerks don’t betray Tyagi, and Tyagi doesn’t betray the Yeerks, and the Andalites listen to reason, and Visser Three isn’t somehow in the loop and ready to take us all down.  And even with all of that, it _at least_ means setting up a voluntary infestation program, and might eventually mean going to war with the Andalites instead.›

‹Wh—I mean, I don’t—›

I sighed and said it all again with different words, filling in more of the background as I held back my rising—and _utterly unfair—_ irritation.

 _Why are you even going through the motions here?_ my imaginary Marco asked.  _It’s not like it’s going to change anything._

 _Shut up,_ I whispered—as if there really was a Marco there, as if I wasn’t just talking to myself.  I didn’t _know_ why I was doing this—didn’t have the energy it took to justify myself, not even to myself.  I’d been acting on instinct, following a sense that I just needed to hear—

— _something_ —

‹I don’t understand,› Cassie said finally, once I had finished explaining.  ‹What is it you—I mean, what were you wanting to ask?›

If it had been the real Cassie—or any real human, for that matter—I might have hesitated, tried to put things in a good light, to find words that wouldn’t make me look stupid or silly or naïve.  But in this case—

_Fuck it._

‹We’re thinking of betraying everybody before they can betray us first,› I said.  ‹I was—curious, I guess—what you thought of that.›

There was a stunned and hollow silence, as if the words had been a slap.

‹Why?› she asked slowly, her felt sense a dark swirl of confusion and dismay.

‹Uh.  Since it looks pretty much impossible that _nobody’s_ going to try to pull something sneaky—›

‹No,› she said, cutting me off, and in the ripple of her emotions I read her real question—not _why betrayal_ but rather _why are you asking ME?_

‹Oh,› I said.  ‹Uh.  Well.›

There was another long silence.

‹Is this—a thing you do?› she asked, her voice excruciatingly, infuriatingly gentle.  ‹Do you—um—wake me up for this sort of thing?  Like, a lot?›

‹No,› I said, holding myself back from gritting our teeth.  ‹This is the first time, actually.›

‹Well,› she continued, still soft.  ‹Um.  Don’t you already—I mean, don’t you _know_ what I’d say?›

And then, still in words, still every bit as audible though not actually directed at me—

 _Does he just need to hear somebody_ say _it?_

‹You don’t understand,› I said.  ‹That’s not—you don’t know how bad it’s gotten—›

‹Then why are you asking _me?›_ she shot back—still gently, but with a hint of rebuke in her tone, a tiny glint of steel.  ‹What if I say _no?_ Will that make any difference?›

It was a good question.

It was also one I didn’t know how to answer.

‹No,› she said, after the longest silence yet.  ‹No, Jake.  You can’t just—that’s not how you—how _we—_ ›

She broke off, unable to find the right words, the thought continuing in a jumble of impulses and images that churned beneath the surface.

 _That’s not what we stand for,_ I imagined her saying, as I ran the feelings through my little black box.  _If we don’t even give them a chance—if we teach them that all they can expect from us is treachery and betrayal—_

‹We can’t afford to be the idealists here, Cassie,› I bit out.  ‹The Visser _blew up_ Ventura.  The whole county.  Half a million people, dead _._ And now the Andalites are threatening to blow up the whole _planet_ —›

‹But isn’t this about _stopping_ that?› she said.  ‹Didn’t you say the Yeerks are the only ones who might be _able_ to stop it?›

‹Unless we take out Visser Three—›

‹Without their help?›

‹We can’t _trust_ them to help, he’s their _boss_ , he could be behind the _whole thing—_ ›

‹But the President—›

‹She’s not—›

‹—you said this is the _very first_ peace talk—›

‹You don’t—›

‹—do we really want to be the reason it doesn’t work—›

‹ _Enough!›_ I snapped, and then—

—reflexively, before I could stop myself, before I could even _think_ about what I was doing—

—I _made_ her be quiet.  Used the Yeerkish morph interface to pinch off the flow of thoughts and words and slam down a wall of silence. 

Her raw shock echoed through the link between us, surprise so great that there wasn’t even room for outrage.  I felt a surge of shame so thick that it was like my stomach was trying to turn itself inside out—

I crushed it.  There was no _time_ for shame.  No time for guilt.  No time for anything but answers.

‹You don’t understand,› I repeated, as I loosened my grip on her mind.  ‹I didn’t—you don’t—it’s not just—›

I sputtered to a halt.  I didn’t have the words.  Didn’t have the words to make her see, to convey the magnitude of the situation—the astronomical stakes, the paralyzing uncertainty, the confusing, conflicting tangle of constraints.  I could see in her thoughts that I had explained it wrong, all wrong—that she still believed the answer was _simple,_ was _obvious._   That she didn’t—

—that she _couldn’t—_

—understand the true and terrible cost of failure.  That it was too big for her to grasp, this girl who had never really seen war.  That she was retreating from it, falling back on Sunday school certainty.

‹I think I _do_ understand, Jake,› she said quietly.  ‹I think I get it every bit as much as you do, and you just don’t want to hear what I have to say.›

‹You haven’t _seen_ it, Cassie,› I ground out, even as the Marco in my head whispered that it was hopeless, that I was wasting my time, that there was no point in trying to convey what couldn’t be conveyed.  ‹The people screaming in their cages—›

_Uh, wait a second.  You don’t actually remember that, either, Jake—_

‹—the dust blotting out the sun, the blood that still sticks to your hands even after you demorph.  You haven’t been there when it’s kill or be killed—›

‹That’s what morals are _for,_ Jake,› she cut in.  ‹They’re there _because_ it’s easy to talk yourself into it.  Because it’s easy to lose perspective, to make excuses, to do things that—things that can’t—that lead to everything falling apart.  That’s why we have rules of engagement, and war crime tribunals, and Geneva conventions—›

‹They killed my parents, Cassie.  My parents, and my grandparents, and my aunt and uncle, and everybody we went to school with—›

‹I watched them take my mother and father,› she countered.  ‹But that’s the _point._   You can’t be _like_ them, Jake.  You can’t just look and think, oh, it’d sure be convenient if we screwed them over just this once, like it’s just this one time and then you can pretend it never happened, like there aren’t any consequences—›

‹Cassie—›

‹ _No,_ Jake!  Look at what you just did to _me!_   You just—you just _Controlled_ me, Jake!  What does that say about—I mean, what could _possibly_ justify—›

She broke off again, some internal censor kicking in as she noticed herself ramping up, burning hotter than her personal set of rules said that she was allowed to burn.

‹It’s not about what you _do, once,_ Jake,› she said, her voice suddenly quiet and razor-edged.  ‹It’s about what kind of person you _are_ —what kind of person you _let yourself be._   You can’t just—you don’t get to say _well, this one’s okay, because reasons._   If you do that, you’re deciding that _that’s the kind of person you are._   That that’s the kind of war you want to fight—the kind of war where there _can’t_ be any peace treaty, because—because—because—›

She broke off again, all heat and pressure with no outlet—so much pressure that even through the layer of my control our fists were clenched and trembling.  ‹Is that really the sort of call you want to make, Jake?› she asked.  ‹Is that really the sort of call you’re _qualified_ to make?›

I said nothing, the sick, oily tension of my uncertainty mingling with the fire of her conviction until my vision started to swim and I thought I might throw up.  I could hear the truth in her words, in a distant, muffled sort of way—the way they would have sounded to me six months ago, clear and obvious and sensible, the lines bright and sharp.

But at the same time—

We had three weeks.

We had three weeks, and only the slimmest of chances, and Cassie—

— _this_ Cassie—

—she just didn’t understand.

 _Couldn’t_ understand.

And she never, ever would.

‹Jake?› she asked, as the silence stretched on.

I still didn’t answer.  I could feel myself tearing in two.  The Jake that I was—the Jake that I _wanted_ to be—and the Jake that I _needed_ to be.  The one who could actually do what it took to win.

 _Like bringing Cassie back from the dead just to abuse her?_ asked Marco, who seemed to have switched sides.  _I mean, as long as she’s not going to_ remember _it—_

‹Jake, say something.›

I looked down at my hands—forced _Cassie’s_ eyes to look down at _Cassie’s_ hands—smooth and slender and dark, with thick calluses from handling shovels and cages and clippers and rope. 

I’d held those hands, twice.  Once on the night Elfangor died, and once in the lifetime before that—shyly, in the dark of a movie theater, where Rachel and Marco wouldn’t be able to see.

I’d worn those hands fifty-five times, now.

But I’d only ever held them twice.

‹Jake—›

‹I’m sorry, Cassie,› I whispered, as I focused my mind.  ‹For—for all of it.  I’m sorry, and—›

I swallowed.

_You owe her that much._

‹Jake, wait—›

‹—goodbye.›

 

*        *        *

 

_The men are walking.  They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal.  Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind.  Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion._

‹Almost there,› Marco whispered.

‹Roger,› I replied.

_On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition.  Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.  They don’t slouch.  It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness._

‹Any word from Tobias?› I asked.

‹Not since we went out of range.  Checked messages just a minute ago; ship hasn’t moved.›

‹Time?›

‹Six fifty-seven.›

_Their faces are black and unshaven.  They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.  In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory—there is just the simple expression of being here, as though they had been doing this forever, and nothing else._

It was a quote I had read in sixth grade, doing research on World War II for Mrs. Nease’s social studies class.  I’d gone back to find it, on one of our foraging missions into some nameless suburb—had given up my chance to shower and gone to the library instead, crawling through the internet until I dug it up again.  I’d flipped the librarian a stolen quarter to print it out, only to realize—when she handed it to me—that I had already memorized it, the words settling into my soul like they’d always belonged there, like a part of me had been carved out to make room for them.

‹Ax here.  Car on the horizon, over.›

‹You sure?› Marco asked.  ‹I don’t—ah, wait, never mind, they’re gearing up.›

_For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all.  Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery._

I shifted in place, fluttering my wings for balance as my legs slipped on the vast ivory surface beneath me.  ‹Kodep,› I said, keeping the band of thought-speak narrow.  ‹Can you see them?›

_Bzzzzzz._

The ivory plane vibrated once in response, nearly sending me into the air in a panic as the dragonfly’s instincts kicked in, screaming for me to take wing and escape.

‹Are the rest of your people in position?›

_Bzzzzzz._

_The line moves on, but it never ends.  They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn’t remember them.  They are too far away now.  They are too tired.  Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia._

‹How much time left?› I asked, switching back to Marco and Ax.

‹Marco here.  Maybe a minute?  They’re in a big SUV, coming in offroad, over.›

‹Tyagi and co?›

‹Chill,› Marco said.  ‹Not moving, not tense, not surprised.  Bet they’ve been tracking that car for the past ten miles.›

 _Meanwhile, the Yeerks have probably been scanning every square inch of this whole desert for the past ten_ hours.

They had no ships nearby, except for the one parked five miles over the horizon—Tobias had been tracking their movements on Thàn’s Marauder’s Map for the past three hours.  But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be watching from space, through the cold, cloudless morning sky. 

Telor and Tyagi had set the rendezvous point just outside of Copper City, in an empty and featureless patch of nowhere about forty miles away from the base.  There’d been no safe way to check out the site in advance, but Google Maps had shown nothing but dust, shrubs, and the occasional mound of shattered rock.  It was as exposed as you could get, with no cover or shelter of any kind—whoever fired the first shot would be the winner.

_Dammit, Cassie._

I shifted again, my double set of gossamer wings tense, trying to make sense of the madhouse mosaic of the dragonfly’s vision.  I could see blues, browns, and drab, dry greens; the colossal outlines of humans and vehicles nearby; a multifaceted shimmering haze that was how the dragonfly perceived Kodep’s hologram.

 _No,_ Erek had said, when I called him at five that morning.  _There’s nothing we can do about another asteroid.  Is—uh—is this a_ hypothetical _question?_

‹They’ve stopped,› Marco reported.  ‹Getting out now.  Looks like four of them, one staying in the car.›

I could see them, sort of—three dark, organic shapes splitting off from a larger black polygon, the image reflected ten thousand times from ten thousand slightly different angles.  It wasn’t the sort of thing the dragonfly’s vision was built for, though—they were too far, too large, and too slow-moving for a system optimized for catching flies in midflight.

‹Ax?› I asked.

‹One moment, Prince Jake.›

There was a pause, and then the dragonfly’s vision shimmered and faded, a double-doubled and over-overlapped picture gradually cohering on top of it—the view from Ax’s four Andalite eyes.  I could see bits and pieces of his blue-furred body, and Marco’s gorilla morph standing next to the image of his father, and—further out—the President’s entourage, backed by a single tank and a widely spaced line of uniformed men and women.

‹Can you see and hear, Prince Jake?›

‹Yeah,› I said, as the three human figures approached to within half a dozen yards and stopped, their hands held out and open.  ‹Thanks.›

“President Tyagi,” said the figure in the center, her words echoing strangely as I heard them both through Ax’s ears and through the antennae of the dragonfly.

The multilayered image shifted as Ax swiveled one eye toward the President, who stood with her hands clasped behind her back, three steps in front of an arc of Secret Service agents.

“Greetings,” said the President, her tone clipped, polite, and precise.  “We thank you for agreeing to this meeting, and for the trust inherent in your physical presence.  How may I address you?”

“I am Dragar six-three-two of Telor,” said the woman.  “‘Dragar’ is an appropriate shortening.”

“And your human host, Dragar?”

The briefest of pauses.  “Her name is Elaine Gallagher.”

“Is she a willing host, Dragar?”

A longer pause, and tenser.

“No, President Tyagi, she is not.”

President Tyagi gestured, and Ax’s eye swiveled further as one of the uniformed soldiers stepped forward, his hands empty, his expression resolute.

“This is Corporal Kelly Autry,” the President said.  “He has volunteered to become your host, and to travel with you back to your ship, as a gesture of goodwill and an official representative of the human species.  In exchange, we request the release of Elaine Gallagher, who we would like to send home.”  She paused, and her glance flickered to the other two Controllers.  “My apologies to the rest of you,” she continued, her tone softer.  “But we must start somewhere.”

There was another pause, this time one of naked shock—even through the disorienting cross-eyed haze of Ax’s secondhand vision, I could see the dropped jaws, the raised eyebrows, the incredulous sidelong looks.

‹Did _you_ know about this?› Marco asked.

‹No.›

“Corporal Autry is carrying no weapons, surveillance devices, or other clandestine technology,” the President continued.  “He is in good health, and has not been ill in the past six months.  He is fit, intelligent, and possessed of several skills we suspect the Telor coalescion will find useful.  We would _like—”_

She broke off again.

“—we would _appreciate_ seeing him returned to us, in three months’ time, so that we may learn from his experience.  We would offer you a replacement host at that time, if such were still necessary.  But we recognize that you may not be prepared to make such a promise, or authorized to do so, and so we do not require it.”

The silence continued, the three Controllers exchanging wordless glances as the rest of us held our breaths.

‹Ax—› I began.

‹We are not sure, Prince Jake.  We suspect that Dragar’s answer will be yes.  It is a compelling offer.  But if Telor is executing a conservative strategy—›

“I accept,” Dragar said, the words cutting through the tense stillness.  “On behalf of Telor, and as a commensurate gesture of goodwill.”

‹A plague?› Marco wondered silently.  ‹Some kind of biological warfare?›

I didn’t answer.

President Tyagi nodded, waving the corporal forward.  “Does Elaine Gallagher require restraint?” she asked, as both Dragar and the corporal knelt together in the dust.  “Or perhaps medical attention?”

Dragar was silent for a moment, as if conversing with its host.  “She will not require restraint,” the alien said finally.  “She will likely benefit from therapeutic assistance, but is otherwise in good health.”

The President nodded, and without another word Dragar reached out, pulling the corporal’s head close until their ears were pressed together.  There was yet another long pause, and then the corporal winced, and then—

With sudden, shocking force, Elaine Gallagher shoved the soldier away from her, hard enough that both of them went sprawling in the dirt.  The soldiers and Secret Service agents stiffened—

“Hold,” said President Tyagi, her voice calm.

They held.

Scrambling backwards on all fours, Elaine Gallagher let out a long, wordless shriek that tapered off into a series of staccato sobs, her entire body shaking as she gasped for breath.  Rolling over onto her side, she made as if to rise to her feet before her trembling, unsteady limbs collapsed beneath her—tried again a second time and collapsed a second time—

‹ _Jesus,_ › Marco whispered.

—until finally, on her third try, she managed to stand, her eyes squeezed shut, her body swaying as if she might faint at any second.  A few steps away, Corporal Autry had also stood and was watching impassively, his body still and controlled, his expression flat and empty.

“Elaine?” President Tyagi asked, her voice still calm but with an extra layer of gentleness.

The woman didn’t respond, a thick, heavy keening still tearing its way out of her throat.  She seemed to be holding herself together through sheer force of will, her fists clenched and shaking, the muscles and sinew in her neck standing out in sharp relief.

“Elaine—can you hear me?”

Nothing.

‹Jake?  Should we—should we do something?›

I didn’t answer.  _Couldn’t_ answer, unable to close my eyes to Ax’s projection, my mind frozen in sudden horror as a memory forced its way to the surface, a night of confusion and anger and a dome of soft, white light—

Tom.

My _brother._

I’d left my brother like that for hours.

For _hours_ , on the night that Ax became a Controller—left him alone in limbo, trapped inside of Erek’s force field while I dealt with the others.  While I did my _duty_ , attended to the things that _mattered._

“Elaine—”

Had Tom screamed like that?  Had he sagged like that?  Collapsed—fainted, maybe—the walls of Erek’s prison holding him upright—

“Certo.  Whitener.”

I tried to claw my way out from under the memory as two Secret Service agents stepped forward, tried to regain my composure as they took Elaine Gallagher gently by the elbows—as she screamed and thrashed and tried to run, only to stumble and fall—as they grabbed her more firmly under each arm, pushed her into the back of one of the waiting cars where the sound of her sobbing became muffled and distant.

 _That’s what I’m afraid of,_ Cassie had said.  Weeks ago—weeks that felt like years.  Not a morph, but the real Cassie, just before she’d given me my first and only kiss. 

 _That’s what I’m afraid of.  Not that we’ll wake up one day and realize that we’ve crossed all the lines, but that we’ll look back and we won’t even_ see _any lines—that we won’t know what all the fuss was about in the first place, because every choice we made was_ justified.

I felt queasy even inside the dragonfly morph, some echo of human sensation mapping itself onto the insect’s tiny body.  I could see that I wasn’t alone, as Ax’s stalk eyes swept across the circle—could see the twisted expressions, the averted eyes—

“Shall we begin again?”

The voice was eerily familiar, somehow instantly recognizable as the same entity that had previously spoken with Elaine Gallagher’s mouth.  I shifted on Kodep’s shoulder as Ax’s main eyes refocused on the former soldier, one stalk remaining on Tyagi while the other continued its constant scan.

“Certainly, Dragar,” said the President, her own voice exactly as it had been.  “Forgive me for being direct, but we are all exposed and events proceed without us.  The United States has two proposals for you.  The first is the return of Essak nine-seven-four, late of Aftran, together with Peter Levy, who wishes to continue as Essak’s host.  In exchange, we request an open, secure, and reliable line of communication with the Telor coalescion.”

The former soldier’s gaze flickered toward me—toward Ax, really—before returning to the President.  “And what about Temrash?” Dragar asked.

‹Small steps first,› Ax said, his thought-speak carrying with it a sense of broadness, a raised voice that everyone present could hear.  ‹Let humans and Yeerks prove themselves capable of meeting one another before we attempt to close the rift between Yeerk and Andalite.  For now, it is enough that Temrash and I share one mind and one purpose.›

Dragar pursed its new lips, furrowed its new brow, and spoke again.  “The line of communication must be three-way,” it declared, with Corporal Kelly Autry’s voice.  “Telor will agree to discussion with the human race, provided that we may also have access to Temrash.”

‹Prince Jake?› Ax asked privately.

‹Agree.›

‹Agreed,› Ax echoed aloud.

“Agreed,” said President Tyagi.

“Agreed,” said Dragar.

The view shifted again as Ax turned his eyes toward the shape of Marco’s father.  That shape moved forward, the ivory plate beneath my dragonfly body vibrating with each step it took.

‹Last chance to bail, Fearless Leader,› Marco whispered.

I said nothing.

Through Ax’s eyes, I watched as Mr. Levy stopped in front of the trio of Controllers, holding still while they scanned him with a number of different devices.  To the dragonfly’s eyes, it looked as if the giant figures were wielding a set of enormous rayguns, the beams scattering across the shimmer of Kodep’s hologram, creating wild, kaleidoscopic auroras.  I felt a desire to hold my breath, though the dragonfly had no lungs to let me—if the Chee technology wasn’t able to stand up to the inspection—

“You are Essak of Aftran?” Dragar asked.

Once again, there was a peculiar echo as I heard the same sounds through both my own senses and Ax’s mental projection.

“Yes,” said Kodep, speaking in Mr. Levy’s voice.

“From the southern reaches of Madra?”

“Northern,” Kodep said, and from the outside I watched as he shaped his hologram into a wry, sad smile.  “You do not trust me, Dragar?”

“Would _you_ , Essak?” Dragar asked.

“No, I suppose not.”

The two other Controllers finished their scan and stepped back, each giving a quick nod.

‹It seems Erek was correct in his appraisal of Yeerk scanning technology,› said probably-Ax.

‹First hurdle,› answered probably-Marco.

I felt my own tension loosen, but not by much—

“From mud and water,” said Dragar, followed by an expectant pause.

“The glow of life,” answered Kodep.

“On the backs of the _khala_ mats—”

“—rode the seeds of Rukh, until their arrival in the home of the Gedd.”

“The memory of flight—”

“—a lie of Baros, for which insult did Odric scatter them across the salt plain.”

“We departed Gara in an armada of three, and made our first rendezvous—”

“—eleven cycles later, with Khyne, Pet, under Visser Eleven, in a nebula on the edge of the Grasskan Nightfall.”

I listened as Ax—as _Temrash,_ really—fed the Chee answers, as the android echoed them with robotic efficiency, projecting Mr. Levy’s voice a mere tenth of a second behind the stream of thought-speak.  I felt the urge to let out a sigh of relief, and rustled the dragonfly’s wings instead—

_That could have gone very differently._

“Well,” Dragar said, after maybe the ninth exchange.  “If you are a spy of the Visser, we are in any case already doomed.”  Stepping aside, the Controller gestured at the black SUV, and Kodep moved forward, climbing into the back.  There was a terrifying cascade of vibrations underneath me as the android settled into an empty seat, followed by a sharp change in pressure as the door shut, and then the world was dark.

“The car will return for us once Essak is safe,” Dragar explained, as the SUV started up and began to back away.  “And in the meantime—your second proposal?”

“We have become aware of a threat to the Earth’s population,” the President said.  “A _specific_ threat, from the Andalite war council.  It’s in the best interests of both Yeerk and human to avert it, and we are unable to do anything about it without Yeerk intervention.  In exchange…help, we are…pared to offer—”

‹Marco here,› said Marco, as the distance increased and the clarity of Ax’s vision began to break down.  ‹You’re headed right for where Tobias said the ship was waiting.  Good luck, buddy.  Try not to die, o—›

The thought cut off abruptly as the SUV passed out of range.

‹You too,› I whispered.  Uselessly, but it still felt important to say it.

_Now comes the hard part._

It was all fast—too fast, like running through the woods in the dark, waiting for a root or branch to trip you up, knock you out.  We’d gone around in circles for the better part of three hours, that morning—demorphing and remorphing under cover, shivering in the desert cold, each of us alone in our hiding space, unable to see or hear the others except inside our own heads.

We’d been searching for a plan— _any_ plan—that seemed like it might be able to stretch to cover all of the possibilities.  There were strategies that made sense if Telor was planning to betray Tyagi right away, and ones that made sense if Telor was planning to string us along first, and ones that made sense if Tyagi was planning to throw us under the bus, and ones that made sense if everybody was actually being honest, and ones that made sense if Visser Three was waiting to ambush us all—

(Those mostly consisted of _don’t be there.)_

—but each one of them required rolling the dice on _something_ , committing some kind of resource in an irreversible way.  And without knowing _which_ thing was most likely to go wrong, it was impossible to be sure which risk was the right risk to take.  The sane thing to do would’ve been to disengage, to pull back and wait for more information, but with the looming pressure of the Andalite threat, we no longer had the luxury of being able to _wait and see—_

In the end, we’d failed to settle on anything at all.  There had been no agreement, no clear consensus, no unity of purpose.  There hadn’t been any _anger_ , either—no pointless bickering or stupid misunderstandings.  Just exhaustion, and demoralization, and frustration, and fear, none of which did anything to stop the clock from ticking forward.

And by the time the sun had started to brighten the horizon—

Well.  It’s not like it made all that much difference whether I died today, or three weeks from now.  One way or another, we had to do _something,_ and we were well past the point where we could pretend like every plan was going to make sense, and every mission was going to be safe.

_The men are walking.  They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal.  Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind…_

We rode in silence for maybe ten minutes, my mind going in circles, alternating between trying not to think about what would happen next and thinking of a hundred reasons why this was stupid, why it wouldn’t work, how I was going to get myself killed and everyone else with me—

The shuddering vibrations of the car slowed, then slowed, then slowed again—stopped, the door opening to let in the bright, unfiltered light of the morning sun.  I fluttered my wings for balance as Kodep swung its legs out of the car—

_Bzzzzzz.  Bzzz-bzzz.  Bzzzzzz._

Whatever dragonflies have instead of adrenaline, I was suddenly feeling a _lot_ of it—that was the signal for Yeerk betrayal.

‹Here?› I asked, in private thought-speak.

_Bzzzzzz-bzzzzzz._

‹Back at the rendezvous?›

_Bzzzzzz._

‹Are we still go?›

_Bzzzzzz._

A sudden clarity, as of marbles rolling down tracks, or LEGO blocks clicking into place.  Kodep thought we could still get inside the Bug fighter, which meant that the Yeerks hadn’t cottoned on to our deception.  And Kodep hadn’t given the sign that meant Visser Three, so—

‹They tried to take Tyagi?›

_Bzzzzzz._

It had been one of the possibilities we’d considered, when we first tried working out how the rendezvous might go.  If Telor believed in the Andalite threat, but _didn’t_ think that the Yeerks could stop it—or didn’t think the Earth was worth the resources it would take to save, which amounted to the same thing—

According to Ax, human technology could make a _big_ difference on the other warfronts, many of which were on non-industrialized planets, against an Andalite military that was stretched far too thin.  Missiles, fighter jets, guns, computers—even things like chemical plants, metal refineries, manufacturing robots, hydroponic farms.  There was a lot you could steal, if you had three weeks to do it and a fleet of Bug fighters and you didn’t much care about the consequences.

And Controller-Tyagi would be a big first step, even if the rest of the human race figured it out immediately.  She had earplugs, but the Yeerks didn’t _know_ that, and so—

‹What about Tobias?  Any of the other ships moving yet?›

_Bzzzzzz-bzzzzzz._

Which meant that _our_ Bug fighter was meant to be the first line of offense.

 _Why only one?_ a distant part of me wondered. _Are they—was that all they could spare, without catching Visser Three’s attention?_

The light around me dimmed suddenly, and I pushed the thought aside, the air growing cooler as Kodep crossed the holographic boundary and entered into the Bug fighter’s hold.  There was a loud _clang_ as the door slammed shut, sending shivers down my antennae.

‹We’re in?› I asked.

 _Bzzzzzz,_ Kodep confirmed.  And then—

_Bzz-bzz-bzz._

Plan A.

Launching off of Kodep’s shoulder, I turned my nose downward and dropped straight toward the floor, already focusing on my human form as I landed beside the android’s steely three-toed claw.  I felt a deeper, lower _thrum_ as the Bug fighter powered up, the combined vibrations of engines and air resistance.

‹How much time do we have?› I asked, my body shooting upward in slow motion as the ten thousand windows of my vision began to blur and blend together.  Through Kodep’s hologram, I could make out the form of two Hork-Bajir Controllers sitting on the other side of the narrow space, though I couldn’t quite tell where they were looking, or whether they were carrying weapons.

_Bzzzzzz.  Bzzzzzz.  Bzzz._

That was cutting it close.  We’d only have about a minute, once I was done demorphing…

‹What happened at the rendezvous?› I asked, as soon as my human hearing started to return.

“Not sure,” came Kodep’s voice—its _normal_ voice, not its mimicry of Marco’s father.  The field surrounding us would keep the sound from leaking out, just as the hologram was hiding my rapidly transforming body.  “Beam weapon, possibly from space.  Wide dispersal.  One flash, and everybody was unconscious, Controllers included.”

 _Crap._   ‹Are we not afraid that’s Visser Three?›

“There was a signal first.  From Dragar, to orbit.  Plus, Erek says Tobias says the Visser’s ship is still on Mars.”

Which didn’t exactly rule out his involvement.  But it did at least buy us some breathing room, since there was no way he could get here from the other side of the solar system fast enough to make a difference.

“You guys okay?” I asked, as my proboscis melted away and reformed into human mouth parts.

“No damage to the Chee on site.”

“And this didn’t trip your violence prevention protocols?”

“No physical damage, no clear mortal threat.”

_Like the cages in the Yeerk pool._

Straightening, I rolled my shoulders, feeling an itchy tingle as my wings folded down against my back and dissolved into skin and fabric.  I was already sweating under my shirt, my heart pounding, adrenaline burning through my veins as I considered what I was about to do.  I was in my own real, fragile body—without even the protection of morph armor, since there was no time for a second transformation.

_The men are walking…_

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” Kodep confirmed.

In a kinder universe, I would have had a moment to gather my courage, but—

Taking a deep breath, I stepped forward, passing through the holographic boundary separating me from the two Hork-Bajir Controllers.

The reaction was instantaneous.  “ _Rhapakat chi!”_ shouted one of them, as they both surged to their feet.  “ _Mit ghotal humanimorph—”_

“Peace!” I said, throwing up my hands.  “I come in peace, no danger—”

It made no difference.  The first Hork-Bajir lunged straight at me, arm blades flashing, while the second unlimbered a Dracon beam—

Time stopped.

A static charge filled the air, like the feeling on a hilltop during a lightning storm, every hair on my arms standing straight up.  Beside me, Kodep stood naked and exposed, his true steel-and-ivory body visible as he poured all of his energy into maintaining the force field that had filled the tiny cabin.  The two Hork-Bajir were frozen in place, one with its finger half an inch from a Dracon beam trigger, the other balanced impossibly on tiptoe, its knifelike arm blades pointed straight at my throat.

“What’s going—”

There was the sound of shoes on metal, and a human Controller came into view around the corner, weapon already in hand—

_That’s three._

“Hey,” I shouted.  “Hey!  Pilot!  If I come around the corner, are you going to shoot me?”

“Stay back!” came the shaky, panicked reply.

I stepped forward, past the statue of the human Controller, and stuck my hand around the corner, pulling it back an instant later—

A flash of red, too dim to cut through the metal of the hull but hot enough to pucker the skin of my nose and lips as I flinched backwards—

I smiled.

There was a strangled yelp, and then nothing.

_That’s four._

“Can you hold all of them?” I asked.

“Yes,” Kodep answered, projecting a note of strain into its simulated voice.

“Did they get a message out to the mothership?”

“No.”

“And the autopilot?”

“No idea.”

I took in another breath— _had it really only been like thirty seconds?_ —and stepped forward, blue fur already spreading like a stain across the skin of my arms.  I wanted to shout, or laugh, or cry, or _something_ —something to acknowledge the sheer thrill of what had just happened, the dice coming up seven, the pure dumb luck of an utterly undeserved victory.  To celebrate the fact that I was _alive,_ and free, instead of dead or shot or captured—that, as utterly insane as the idea had been, it had _worked._

But instead, I just slid the seat back, making room for the Andalite body that was busy emerging from my smallish teenage frame.  Beside me, the human pilot was frozen in place, his face tight with tension, his eyes darting back and forth, his hand still pointing a Dracon beam back into the hold.

 _It’s not about what you do, once, Jake,_ the copy of Cassie had said.  _It’s about what kind of person you are—what kind of person you let yourself be._

And she had been right.

 _What can we do to help?_ Erek had asked, when I called him that morning.  When it became clear that we had no better options and no one else to ask for help—that even if the Visser had swayed them over to his side, we could at least trust them not to _kill_ us, or put us in a situation where we were likely to be killed by someone else.

 _That depends,_ I’d answered.  _If we were to promise—to swear—to commit one hundred percent that no matter what, we wouldn’t use a Bug fighter for violence, even if it meant the difference between life and death—_

_Would you believe us?_

 

*        *        *

 

“All right,” I said.  “Let’s wake her up.”

We were cloaked and invisible, parked in a shallow depression between two anonymous hills in the middle of the Somali desert, a latitude and longitude pulled at random off of the internet.  There were fifteen of us on board, crowded into the cramped metal hold—Kodep and I had left the Bug fighter’s crew back in California alongside Dragar and the other unconscious Controllers, and had scooped up Marco, Ax, Tyagi, a couple of Secret Service agents, and a couple of other Chee as a swarm of helicopters thundered toward us from Edwards Air Force Base.  We’d grabbed the rest of the Animorphs on our way out—after Ax and Kodep swept the ship, disabling half a dozen secret transmitters and tracking devices, including two worn by the President—and were now as undetectable as we could possibly be, with only Serenity capable of tracking us.

‹Though I’m still confused by what this Thàn guy is saying,› Ax had grumbled.  ‹If I’m understanding the theory right, it shouldn’t be _possible_ to locate and triangulate with a single detector like that.  Two _maybe_ , but not one.›

We’d asked Kodep and Erek to revive Marco and Ax immediately, to discuss our options—most importantly, whether to bring Tyagi with us, or leave her in the desert, or something else.  In the end, we’d decided to bring her along, since Edwards was no longer even remotely secret from the Yeerks, and since we’d needed to talk to her about what to do next.

“Roger,” said Erek, leaning over her unconscious form and stretching out a holographic hand.

Humanity had a hyperdrive, now—a trustworthy one, that was neither damaged from a crash nor a “gift” from Visser Three.  That meant that we were no longer dependent on the Yeerks for protection, if we wanted to try for a MAD deterrent and we could manage to get the message through to the Andalites without their help.

(Though it would take some rules lawyering on what we’d meant by “Bug fighter” when we made our promise to the Chee, if we pulled out the hyperdrive and strapped it to a rock.  Also, there was basically zero chance that Ax would _actually_ let us go through with it, if the issue came up for real, though we could in theory get the coordinates out of the Elfangor morph.)

The Bug fighter also meant that we were mobile in general—Ax had checked its fuel reserves, and they were sufficient for something like two hundred trips around the world, in-atmosphere, or ten or fifteen loops around the solar system.  That, plus the edge that Serenity gave us—

—provided we didn’t have to blow up Serenity ourselves to stop the government from tracking _us_ , as Marco had pointed out—

—meant that it might actually be possible for us to take Visser Three by surprise, and either capture or kill him.  Though the window on that opportunity was shrinking, depending on whether Telor would try to cover up the missing fighter or simply tell him about it.

Whichever way we ended up going, though, it was time to bring the President into the conversation.

There was a hum as Erek placed a finger against her temple, and then a brief flash of white light, and then—

“Huh.”

Another hum, another flash.

“Is she—”

“No, she’s breathing—look.”

“What’s going—”

“Quiet,” I said, cutting through the rising babble.  “Wait.”

A third hum-and-flash, and still no reaction.

“Erek?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, unless—”

“What?”

“When I went to revive her the first time.  A few seconds ago—right when I sent the charge.”

“What?”

“Her Z-space interlink.  It failed.”

There was a moment of open, abject horror as the words slowly sunk in.

“Her Z-space…?”

“Interlink.”

“Oh, God,” Marco whispered.  “Oh, _shit.”_

“Wh—”

“She was in _morph?”_

“Oh, jeez, morph armor—”

“The time limit—”

“Erek, why didn’t you _say_ something—”

“What?  _Me?_   You guys are in and out of morph all the time, nobody told me to give you _status updates—”_

“Look, it’s not _that_ bad, right?  If she was in morph armor, then she’s lost a couple of weeks, at most—”

“Erek.  Can you do the thing you did with Jake?  Burn off the control tissue, wake her back up?”

“Hang on,” Erek said.  “Hang on.  Let me see if I can get a clear scan of which tissue it is.  Last time, it had been dying for days, the decay made it easier…”

Trailing off, the android bent over the unmoving body, projecting a focused frown onto his face as he put one hand on either side of her head.  “Yes,” he said, after a long pause.  “I found a frequency that causes the tissue to respond.  I can target it just like I did last time.”  He looked up.  “Do you want me to?”

They all turned to look at me, and some tiny, tired part of me threw up a bitter flag of resentment.  “Yes,” I said, keeping my voice level, trying to inject confidence and authority into my tone.  “Go for it.”

I turned to look at the two Secret Service agents lying next to her, still unconscious.  “By the way, _they_ aren’t about to pass the time limit, are they?”

“No,” Kodep said, speaking up from the back of the room.  “They haven’t had the glow at any point.”

There was another hum, followed by a sound so faint I could _almost_ convince myself I was imagining it—a sort of squelching, sizzling, crackling sound.

I wanted to throw up.

“Tobias,” I said, turning away again.  “She acquired her armor the day you gave her the morphing power?  Right there with you and—what’s it—Paul?”

Tobias’s brow furrowed.  “I don’t—I’m—I can’t remember.  Maybe?  I know _he_ acquired _her_ right then, but I’m not sure about the other way around—”

“What if it’s not her?” Rachel cut in.

Another hush fell over the room, the only sound the hum-and-crackle of Erek’s continued laser surgery.

“You mean, like—like _Nickerson_ or somebody?” asked Tom.

I felt a cold tingle in my fingers and toes.

“Why not?” said Marco, the tiniest hint of laughter creeping into his voice, the hollow amusement of despair.  “I mean, she’s already got Paul Evans doing it, right?  And if you think Telor might double-cross you—”

_Crap._

It made sense.

It made _perfect_ sense.

It was _obvious,_ in fact.

And we just—

—hadn’t thought of it.

_Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion…_

What _else_ had we missed?

“Ax,” I said.  “Get us into space, now.”

‹Direction, Prince Jake?›

“Doesn’t matter.  Away from everyone and everything.”

‹Roger.›

There was a new hum beneath the sound of Erek’s work, and a slight sensation of acceleration, and then we were falling upward, the desert shrinking away below.

_Serenity can track us._

We’d been thinking they would be careful, if we had the President on board—that they would communicate first, rather than launching a direct attack.  But if she was just a duplicate—if they sent the other Bug fighter after us—

“Erek,” I said, my voice cracking.

 _Why’s your voice cracking, Fearless Leader?  It’s just_ one _dead person.  Not like it’s a big deal or anything._

“—how much longer?”

“Maybe thirty seconds,” he said.  “Then I’ll try waking her up again.”

“Will she even know?” Tobias asked.  “I mean, Jake—Jake didn’t—”

“She’ll know,” Garrett said quietly.  “She was _awake_ , wasn’t she?  Turned on, or whatever.  She wouldn’t trust a negotiation like that to somebody just _pretending_ to be her, she’d want to be the one actually driving.  She’ll remember.”

I turned to stare at the still form lying on the deck—at the rise and fall of her chest, the tiny movements of the blood beneath her skin that said she was alive, that she wasn’t just a corpse lying there.

_That’s really Tyagi in there._

Whoever else it _had_ been—whether it had been the real Tyagi in morph armor, or Sergeant Nickerson, or some other volunteer—

They were Najida Tyagi, now.  Now, and forever.

_What if—_

“Ready,” Erek said, cutting across my thought.

Another hum, another flash of light, this time followed by a fraction of a gasp—the barest beginnings of an emotional reaction, cut short by iron control.

“Where am I?” asked the voice of the President of the United States of America.

There was a long silence as everyone turned to me.  As everyone waited for me to answer.

“You’re on a Bug fighter, Madam President,” I said, as she sat up and took in her surroundings.  “Do you know what a Bug fighter is?”

Her eyes narrowed, thinning by less than the thickness of a hair.  “Yes.  Of course.  What happened?  I was in the middle of a negotiation, and then—”

“The negotiation failed,” I said quietly.  “Dragar sent a signal, and some kind of beam weapon knocked everyone unconscious.  We suspect they were planning to kidnap you, maybe all of the others too—”

“We had contingency plans in place for—”

She broke off, and the eyes narrowed another thousandth of a degree.

_If they had contingency plans in place, why weren’t there a hundred missiles flying at the Bug fighter the second things went south?  They had Thàn—they knew where it was just as well as we did—_

“We did, too,” I said, shoving the distracting thought aside.  “Madam President, I’m very, very sorry to be rude, in a few minutes I’ll be happy to drop you off anywhere you want—provided it’s safe for us—but first, I have to ask.  Are you a morph?”

“What?”

“Are—are you the _original_ Najida Tyagi?  Or—are you—were you—someone else?”

This time, the eyes widened, the skin lightening from coffee to caramel as the blood drained away from her face.  “What time is it?” she breathed.

“Eight thirteen A.M.,” I said.  “Pacific.”

“Foster,” she murmured.  “Oh, Foster, you idiot—”

Not Nickerson, then.

I felt a knot of tension in my chest try to loosen itself, felt another part of me move to object—

 _As soon as I saw it was a kid I didn’t know, I felt better,_ Cassie had said.  _Like it would have been worse if it were a friend of mine, like this kid’s life didn’t_ matter _because I didn’t know his_ name _._

One life.

We’d traded one human life, for one Bug fighter.

_Well, one Bug fighter plus the enmity of the entire US government—_

_Shut up, Marco._

I turned to look out through the Bug fighter’s viewscreen, at the curve of the horizon shrinking away as we rose higher and higher, the blue sky fading into black.

_Just the simple expression of being here, as though they had been doing this forever, and nothing else—_

I let out a breath.

It was the same question it had always been.  The same mission, the same goal.  The fact that we were on a Bug fighter instead of in morph made no difference.  The fact that we’d kidnapped a presidential decoy made no difference.  The fact that somebody named Foster had died—that Cassie had died—that so many people had died—

It made no difference.  We had a job to do, and we had three weeks left to do it.

“Jake?” Rachel asked, her tone laced with caution.

“We’re going to drop her off someplace safe,” I said, the words sounding as if they were coming from someone else’s mouth, hollow and tinny and fragile next to the commanding voice of President Tyagi.  “We’re going to drop her off, and then—”

I broke off, looking around at the faces filling the narrow space—Animorphs, Chee, humans and Andalites.  I weighed my words—what could be said, what was safe—ran them through my little black box to see how they would land.

_They have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all.  Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery._

It felt like years since we’d all been in the same place at the same time.

All of us, except—

“And then we’re going to find Visser Three.”

 

 


	43. Chapter 32: Marco

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is Rachel. It will be short (unlike this one, which, fair warning, is 19000 words), and should come out within ten days.
> 
> By the way, if you're interested in music that is an *incredibly* good fit for the themes of this fic, go listen to "The All Spark" from the original Transformers score (and, y'know, pretend you don't know where the music came from while you do it).
> 
> EDIT: For those who struggle with the final section of this chapter, I recommend reading the words out loud? Or "out loud" by mouthing or muttering them under your breath? I predict this will help.

**Chapter 32: Marco**

 

Sometimes—

—not all the time, not nearly often enough, but _sometimes—_

—we manage to make it work. We figure it out in time—get there faster than anyone else, with all our shit together, enough to make the difference.

The truck. The truck had gone okay.

And the factory, and the broadcast.

Edwards Air Force Base—

Well, that had been a shitshow, but we’d all gotten out alive in the end. And then, with the rendezvous—

I had to hand it to Jake, he’d pulled that one off beautifully. Right up until the moment when he’d said, _out loud, in front of two different potential hostiles,_ what our next target was.

It was _almost_ as bad as the way Tobias had just—handed over Thàn and the Serenity data, no strings attached. Which I wasn’t complaining about—out loud—since it _had_ gotten my dad out of there, and since it hadn’t exactly been my finest hour, either. Threatening to expose Paul Evans—that had _not_ gone well.

But sometimes.

Sometimes, we did okay.

‹Rachel here,› said Rachel, from the back of the hold—

—and none of them moved. None of them twitched. None of them so much as batted an eye—not even the new kid, David.

I was almost proud.

‹Speaking of Visser Three,› she continued, as the rest of us reacted not-at-all. ‹I—ah—I’m pretty sure I found something.›

I went on not looking, for the sake of Erek and Kodep and the Tyagi clone and the Secret Service agents and my dad and the slug he was carrying around inside his head. I knew what I _would_ see, if I looked—Rachel, lying on her back in the corner, feet propped up against the wall, hair fanned out around her head, face lit up by the blue glow of the tablet Thàn had left us, the tablet Ax had Mad-Max-ified so that it could stay connected to the internet even as we ripped around the earth at twenty thousand miles an hour. Her eyes would be tracing back and forth, even if she’d already seen the important part—her expression flat even if her heart rate was crawling upward—

‹It took me a while, because there’s not just _one_ pattern, there’s a bunch of patterns that overlap, and the ships switch in and out, and a lot of it’s noise. But I’ve been looking back over the past few months, and I’m pretty sure—›

Beside me, Jake continued to fidget with the burner cell phone he’d been carrying, just as Ax continued to let his hands drift randomly over the control panel and David continued playing cute in front of not-Tyagi.

‹There’s this thing. Every now and then, one of the other Bug fighters will go and scope out someplace new. Never the same fighter twice in a row, never the same spot twice. Usually, it’s just somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. There was one in south China, one on an island a few hundred miles off Australia, one in Norway, one in Maine, _two_ in Argentina—›

I felt my brain shift into high gear, trying to force the pieces into place as I rushed ahead to the finish line—

‹—always someplace green, always away from people. And then—it’s not always exactly the same, sometimes it’s just a few hours later, sometimes as much as a full day, depending on what other stuff he’s up to in the meantime—›

‹The Visser’s ship?›

‹Yeah. Every time. Stays for about an hour or two.›

‹How often is this?›

‹About every three days or so. Sometimes longer, never more than ten. And—well—it’s been six days since the last one, and—›

I felt a bolt of nervous energy crawl across my body like slow-motion lightning.

‹—right around the time the rendezvous was going south, a Bug fighter took off from a field on the border between Cambodia and Vietnam. And—uh—well, Visser Three’s ship left Mars about five minutes after that.›

Nobody froze. Nobody sucked in a breath. The seconds ticked by, with nothing to mark the sinking-in of what she’d just told us.

And then, because sometimes—

—not always, but _sometimes—_

—I managed to actually think ahead, to actually put the pieces together, and _quickly—_

‹Marco here,› I said, fighting to keep my body relaxed, to keep myself from starting to sweat. ‹We need a distraction, _now._ ›

‹Jake. Where— _here?›_

‹No. Edwards. Washington. New York. Something to keep them—to keep the government, the military—›

I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t need to. They got it.

‹Tobias,› I said. ‹Still Marco. Is there _any_ reason—any reason at _all—_ to believe that Thàn won’t have just—told them everything? Any reason to believe they _don’t_ know which ship is Visser Three’s?›

There was a long silence, and I wondered whether Tobias and Garrett were—

_Who are you kidding? Of course they are._

‹Tough to say,› came the answer. ‹He definitely told _us_ everything right off the bat, but we had one of his friends vouching for us, and we had the cube—I dunno, the reason he didn’t go to the government in the _first_ place was because he was pretty sure they’d been compromised—›

 _Wishful thinking._ ‹Rachel,› I interrupted. ‹Still Marco. Did Thàn _label_ the Visser’s ship in any special way? Like, as you’re looking on his map thing, is it—›

‹No, nothing’s labeled. Just color coding for different types of data—›

‹Is there a color for morphing? Like, is morphing its own special color?›

Another silence.

‹Yeah.›

‹Then they know,› I said, feeling a heavy weight of certainty settle into my stomach. ‹It’s not going to take them—how long’s it been—six hours, to put _that_ one together. His is the only ship that morphing happens on, right?›

‹Well, there’s weird orange _flickers_ on a couple other ships sometimes, and out on Mars—›

_What the—_

No. Not a priority. ‹Jake. If Tyagi’s crew tries to take him out—›

‹Maybe we should let them,› somebody spoke up.

‹If they screw it up—› said someone else.

‹US black ops in a Vietnamese jungle? Please.›

‹The rendezvous went—›

‹—all to hell—›

‹—went _fine_ , I was going to say, things blew up but it’s not like they hadn’t _thought ahead,_ they didn’t put the real Tyagi on the line—›

‹They were more than happy to put _us_ on the line, though—›

‹ _TOMRACHELTOBIASRACHELDAVIDRACHELMARCOGARRETT!›_ bellowed a voice, shocking and sudden and impossibly loud. I managed to stop myself from flinching, but only barely.

‹Follow. The. Frickin’. _Rules._ Please. Garrett, over.›

There was another long silence, broken only by a soft, wordless mental chuckle that I was pretty sure was coming from Tobias, or maybe from Ax.

‹Jake here,› said Jake, even as he continued to stare blankly out the front viewport, his eyes dull and unfocused, his jaw slack. He hadn’t flinched, either. ‹Don’t forget about Telor—last we checked, they were in panic mode—›

‹Still no m—crap, sorry, _Rachel here._ Still no major ship movements over the past two hours—›

An entirely automatic part of my brain sent up a flag—why _hadn’t_ Telor sprung into action—

‹—maybe a _slight_ uptick in chatter? But hard to say. Over.›

‹Marco here. Rachel, Ax—is there any way to tell where a message is _going?_ Like, who it was addressed to? Over.›

‹Aximili responding. No—Serenity is picking up the Z-space disruption that causes the signal wave to propagate, and that disruption has no directionality in the traditional sense, since Z-space vectors have no simple correspondence to real-space vectors—›

‹Rachel here—sorry, Ax. The scout fighter sent a message just as it was taking off, and there weren’t any messages from the mothership—any messages at all, from _any_ ship—in the previous ten minutes, or in the time between that message and V3’s departure. Also no messages _from_ V3’s ship since it left Mars.›

 _We’re going to have to take out Serenity,_ I realized, the knot in my stomach twisting as the others continued to talk. That was just _way_ too much intel to leave lying around, and the Yeerks were bound to tumble to it eventually—

_Shit._

I felt a small trickle of adrenaline as my mind made another connection under the surface.

_Thàn._

Thàn would have set up a self-destruct.

…right?

I mean, he _must_ have, right? He’d been sitting on top of the damn thing for, like, _months_ , just thinking through all of the possibilities—

And Tobias had just _handed him over,_ and Jake and I hadn’t even _tried_ to stop it. We hadn’t even had time to—

‹Tobias,› I said, interrupting. ‹I mean, this is Marco, but—Tobias. Sorry. Side note. You did a morph check of Thàn, right? Over.›

‹Tobias here. Yeah, he was clean. Why? Over.›

In the old days, I would’ve just brushed past it. _Tell you later,_ or _nothing, just checking._

But we no longer had the luxury of letting one another make mistakes. Sooner or later, one of those mistakes was going to get us all killed.

‹Uh. I was thinking we might want to see if he’d put any thought into how to blow up Serenity, now that like a dillion people know about it. You know, before the Yeerks inevitably get their hands on it, and then take us all down five minutes later.›

Nobody seemed to have anything to say to that. Keeping my movements light and casual, I stretched, letting my head roll over toward the corner where the two Chee were standing—motionless, holograms off, looking like Transformers made out of platinum and porcelain.

‹Jake here. Rachel—do we have an ETA on the Visser?›

‹Uh—›

‹Aximili here. I would need to look at the Marauder’s Map to be sure, but unless he makes a jump—I believe Mars is approximately two hundred million of your miles from the Earth. If he isn’t taking any extraordinary measures, he should arrive in approximately five hours. Over.›

_Shit._

_Shit, shit, shit._

It was all happening too fast—too fast _again,_ for what felt like the twentieth time, we were _reacting_ again, reacting instead of taking the time to _think—_

‹Jake?› I whispered—still in a way that the others could hear, but a whisper nonetheless. ‹Jake, buddy, what’ve you got?›

It wasn’t fair, to put this one on him. But whatever the hell it was that was going on in that little black box of his, whether it was some kind of crazy Ellimist fuckery or just him being the kind of guy who really _got_ people—

Whatever it was, Jake’s ability to guess what other people were about to do was pretty much all we had right now.

‹I think—› he began, and then faltered. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the tiniest furrow carving a shadow across his forehead. ‹I don’t think Visser Three is in the loop— _yet._ The way they tried to take Tyagi—the way he stuck around on Mars—it just doesn’t seem like his style. Too—I dunno—too _passive,_ maybe?›

‹Unless he knows we’re watching,› I pointed out.

A fractional shake of his head, a microscopic tightening of his lips. ‹No,› he said, his mental voice sounding firmer this time, more sure of itself. ‹That’s _definitely_ not his style. To let us have _this much_ access? See _this much_ of what’s going on? We wouldn’t even _know_ about Mars, if it wasn’t for Serenity.›

_Unless Serenity itself is just a giant hoax._

But I didn’t say it out loud. For one thing, that was a little too much to swallow, a little too paranoid even for me. And for another—

Well. There was no point in asking Jake’s black box for answers if I was just going to quibble with everything it had to say.

‹All right,› I said. ‹So—working theory. V3’s out of the loop. How long does he _stay_ that way?›

‹Garrett here. Not long, I’d bet. Over.›

‹Tobias. Telor’s thinking—what—they want to get as much out of the Earth as they can, they don’t want Visser Three to kill them, they don’t want to lose the larger war—›

‹Jake here. Marco—what _exactly_ did that Controller—Dragar—what did they say, after I left? And Tyagi?›

I swallowed. ‹Tyagi said—she said, uh, ‘the Andalites have a weapon they believe can destroy the planet.’ I think she was deliberately vague about what. Dragar tried to draw her out, get some details. She admitted that we’d gotten the information from a secret source in the Andalite power structure—that it wasn’t a direct, delivered threat, like trying to coerce us to _do_ something, or whatever. And then she offered to set up a voluntary infestation program, asked Dragar if the Yeerks would declare Earth to be under their protection. And then Dragar said—›

I screwed my eyes shut, trying to remember. ‹Nothing special?› I said. ‹I mean, from what I remember, they just kept talking right up until everything went black. No declarations, no monologuing, no obvious code words—›

‹Did Tyagi say anything about the deadline?› Jake interrupted.

‹Yeah. She said there wasn’t much time, that the Andalites were planning their strike for late June, early July at the latest—›

‹That’s it, then,› Jake said. ‹They’re scared.›

‹What?›

‹Scared. Of the Visser. Going after the President was a mistake, a knee-jerk reaction, and now—he’s got—he must have some kind of hold over them, something more than just authority, or they would’ve done something about him already, as soon as they started thinking about mutiny. They were trying to sneak around behind his back, but then they heard about an Andalite threat, and they panicked—›

It didn’t _quite_ sound right. There was a note of confusion in there, something that was just a little bit off, didn’t really seem to fit. ‹But then we stopped them immediately,› I said, trying to pick up the thread.

‹Right. And now they’re stuck. If Tyagi decides to route _around_ them, talk to the Visser directly—he’ll find out what they’ve been up to—›

I felt my brow trying to furrow and deliberately relaxed it.

 _There’s Telor trying to get back Aftran, and thinking about mutiny—that’s secret number one. Then there’s the Andalite threat, which is—not a secret, surely they’ll want the Visser to know_ that. _But then there’s how they found out, and why they waited to say anything, and how they lost a Bug fighter, and who authorized the attempt on Tyagi—_

Call all of that secret number two. Put them both together, and what made the _most_ sense for Telor—

_Just steal as much manpower and materiel as you can._

Given that their response had been to turn _down_ Tyagi’s proposal, they clearly weren’t ready to commit to mutually assured destruction with the Andalites—either that, or they didn’t think it would work, as a deterrent. Which meant they _really, truly believed_ that the Earth had only a couple of weeks left.

But then—

In that case—

Why hadn’t they started already, President or no President?

There was a feeling of pressure building, a sense of sand pouring through an hourglass, red digital clocks counting down as my confusion mounted.

‹Rachel,› said Jake. ‹Or Ax, I guess. I’m guessing there’s no way to tell the difference between him heading to the mothership versus heading to the Earth, this far out? Over.›

‹Aximili here. No, over.›

‹This is Rachel. Checking the other times—it looks like—yeah, okay. So he usually goes straight there. Straight to the Earth, I mean, whenever another Bug fighter scouts out a spot. I’m only seeing once—maybe twice—yeah. Something like nine out of ten times? He goes straight there, and then when he leaves the surface—he pretty much always checks in with the rest of the fleet after that. Looks like—maybe half the time he goes up to the mothership, and the other half—he sends a message, then they send one, then he sends one, and so on. So—›

Those time-lapse videos of flowers growing and dying, all in an instant—

‹So yeah. Over.›

There was another silence, and I felt my brain straining so hard it physically hurt, the blood pulsing thick and turbulent just behind my eyes.

_Something—_

_Think of SOMETHING—_

There was Visser Three—still out of the loop, but only for a few more hours, at which point he would—

_Error._

There was Telor—presumably in panic mode, paralyzed for the moment, but when they _did_ move, they would move _fast_ , and in which direction—

_Error._

There was Tyagi—Tyagi and the rest of the military, who had all the same information we did, who knew exactly where we were, would notice _us_ moving toward Vietnam even if for some reason they weren’t already watching the Visser—

_Error._

There was Erek, and Kodep, and the promise we’d made, not to use the Bug fighter for violence. A promise they could hold us to, a promise there would be real consequences for even trying to break.

There was the Tyagi clone and her two Secret Service agents.

There was Serenity.

There was the Andalite threat.

There was—

There was—

_ERROR._

‹Jake,› I said. ‹It’s Marco.›

I could feel my heart hammering in my chest, and hoped that neither of the Chee was paying attention.

_Sometimes we figure it out._

‹Jake,› I repeated. ‹Something doesn’t smell right.›

‹What?›

‹Think about it. All this pressure, all this confusion—everything coming together, all at once—all of it coming to a head at the _same time_ —›

I trailed off, trying to find the right words as the precursor to panic tightened my throat. This burning need to _find a next action—_

‹We snatch a Bug fighter, and it just _happens_ to be right before Visser Three lands on Earth?› I said. ‹Right after we got access to technology that would tell us where he’s landing? Out in the wilderness, away from witnesses? And also Tyagi knows about it too, and knows about the Andalites, and is pissed at us, and also Telor has just gone off the rails and might, like, start tying to kidnap a whole country or something before the world blows up, and—and we’re _all_ here, even the Chee—and a Tyagi clone—when was the last time we were all in the same place at once like this? And—›

‹I get it,› Jake said, cutting me off. ‹But—what—›

‹The Ellimist.›

The voice was dark and heavy, and somehow I knew instantly it was Ax—not the lost, frightened cadet, but the strange, unsettling hive-mind that had been slowly incubating inside of him, the shadow of a dead warrior and a fragment of an eldritch nightmare bound up with the mind of an alien kid and the ghost of my best friend’s brother.

‹This is the Ellimist’s hand at work,› he asserted. ‹A confluence of implausibilities, the unlikely made inevitable. We are being guided, manipulated—channeled into a specific course of action.›

They weren’t just words. They were pronouncements, prophecy—spoken with flat, immovable certainty, as if they’d been forged from black steel. I looked over at him—his bearing unchanged, his hands still drifting randomly over the controls, his stalk-eyes moving in a carefully carefree pattern as he perfectly maintained the illusion that nothing was happening. I looked at him, and _past_ him—at the bright blue curve of the Earth below, the velvet background all poked through with stars.

I had noticed it, when we first launched into orbit—had felt the rush of awe, even with all of the fear and stress and pressure, had spent a few minutes gazing silently down as the continents drifted by. But suddenly, hearing Ax’s voice in my head, it was easy to _remember_ that I was out in space—to feel every inch of the hundred miles beneath us, and the vast emptiness of the endless void above. To remember what had happened the _last_ time we had encountered the inscrutable, alien god—the day that time had stopped, and Cassie had died, and all of Ventura had burned.

I shivered. It suddenly seemed weird that that _hadn’t_ been filling my mind ever since—that I’d ever managed to return to anything even a _little_ bit like normal.

‹And before you ask,› Ax intoned—still sounding tangibly alien, with almost none of the humanity that had bled into him since his merging with Temrash—‹the answer is _no._ It does not matter what we do. There is no point in wondering which path we were meant to take, in agonizing over whether we are fulfilling expectations or subverting them—whether we were meant to accede to the pressure, or to notice it and resist. Whichever path we choose, it is _always_ the one that the Ellimist wanted. Inevitably. Infallibly. To think otherwise is sheer folly. The Ellimist’s wishes are not something we have the power to accept or reject. They simply _are._ ›

I looked back at Jake. At the way his shoulders sagged, the dark circles under his eyes. At the distant emptiness in his stare that was only partially on purpose, that couldn’t possibly have been just for show.

That—

That made it _better_ , actually—didn’t it?

I mean, if things really were outside our control—really, truly, totally outside—if there was _nothing_ we could do about it, no matter how hard we tried or how carefully we thought—

Then in a way, it didn’t matter at all. It was just part of the background, like gravity. Maybe the Ellimist wanted us dead, maybe it wanted us alive, maybe it wanted us to win or to lose or to do something else altogether. But either way, in the meantime, all that _we_ could do was—

 _Your best,_ Elfangor had said. _As you would have done anyway._

‹Jake,› I whispered. ‹Jake, this isn’t right. We can’t—we have to bail.›

I looked around the tiny space again—at Jake and Ax, Tobias and Garrett, Rachel and Tom and the new kid David. At the robots, and the agents, and the President’s clone. At my dad, curled up in the farthest corner, as if hoping he could fade into the background.

‹It all comes back to Visser Three,› Jake said softly.

I swallowed, my throat still tight and dry.

‹He’s the key to all of it. Without him—if we could just get _rid_ of him—›

I understood.

Without the Visser, there’d be nothing stopping the Yeerks and the Andalites from making peace. Nothing to stop Telor from forming an alliance with Tyagi, and countering the Andalite threat. No reason for us to mistrust the Chee—no reason for the Andalites to be _so afraid_ that they’d rather commit genocide than pass up a ten percent chance of _maybe_ catching Esplin in the fireball.

‹I think we have to try,› Jake said. ‹Even if it’s a trap.›

‹That’s _why_ we have to bail,› I said.

 _Because it makes_ too much _sense, because it’s all lined up too perfectly—_

Was I just fooling myself? Talking myself in circles? Just because I _thought_ real life ought to be messier, that didn’t mean that things _never_ lined up on their own, just out of coincidence—

But this need—this pressure to take action _now,_ the sense of being poked and prodded into place—even Thàn, he’d been out there for months, _we’d_ been out there for months, why was it _just now_ that we were suddenly able to track the Visser’s movements—

‹You don’t ever get into the car with the kidnapper, man,› I said. ‹Somebody _wants_ us there. That by itself is reason enough not to go.›

There was a silence that felt like glass.

‹Rachel here—›

I closed my eyes.

‹—I think Marco’s right. Over.›

I opened them again.

‹Tobias. Me, too. Over.›

I looked at Jake.

‹Fine,› he said, his voice sounding—if anything—even _more_ tired, even more hollowed-out and empty. ‹What’s plan B, then?›

I looked back out through the viewport, at the dim scattering of stars.

_The Visser._

Serenity, and Tyagi, and the Andalites, and Telor, but the Visser most of all.

‹Okay,› I said.

I wasn’t sure. I didn’t _know,_ like I had with the truck.

But sometimes—

‹I don’t know what to do. But I think I know where to _start_.›

 

*        *        *

 

‹My people.›

They weren’t words—not exactly. More like titles, or subtitles—summary descriptions, superimposed over an image that was more than an image, the sense of looking out across a sea of people and seeing only friends and family and neighbors and allies, a thousand different faces and every one of them warm and familiar.

‹My people, I have grave news.›

A dark shadow passing over the crowd, a tiny shiver of cold anticipation.

‹We cannot win this war.›

A sudden, sinking panic, the feel of the ground dropping out and falling away.

‹The Council seeks to project confidence, believing that _if we simply believe,_ this will be sufficient to make the difference. They think that the situation is uncertain, and salvageable, and that a prophecy of victory will be self-fulfilling.›

I felt my own tiny shiver at the concept-that-my-brain-subtitled as _prophecy_ , at the memory of a memory, four names written in a burning script that no alien should have been able to understand in the first place—

‹But they are wrong. Desbadeen has fallen, whether they have told you or not. Leera and Gara teeter on the brink. This war _will_ be lost—was a terrible mistake from the beginning—and to prosecute it further would be to throw away the lives of our people in pride and perfidy, until the enemy comes to burn the very grasses of our home. We must seek a peaceful resolution—seek it _now_ , while we yet retain sufficient power to inspire hesitation, to make compromise seem preferable to conquest. It is a bitter truth, but it is one we must accept quickly and fully, without the naïve wishfulness of youths who think that the world _is_ what they _want_ it to be.›

I didn’t move the stalks—didn’t interfere with the war-prince’s control of our shared body as he stared into the lens of the communicator. But I could feel them around me, the others—feel their silent solemnity, hope and despair and a funereal helplessness.

‹There will be those who argue that this is not of the Path,› Elfangor continued. ‹That dissent, in this of all times, is the highest of treason. That unity means survival, and that it is impermissible—even immoral—to even _think_ of questioning the wisdom of the Chancellor and the will of the Council. Many of you will have felt the wondering in your own hearts, and banished it, for the sake of solidarity.›

Our nostrils flared, and for a moment I could almost _see_ the intangible aura of power that the Andalite was gathering around himself, the archetype of a warrior girding himself for battle.

‹But I am Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul,› he said. ‹Pilot of the _Blooded Blade,_ heir to Alloran-Who-Fell, avenger of the Pangaban Colony and savior of the Hayati Reach, known to our enemies as the death that comes in darkness, the blade that falls without warning. That you will wonder if even _my_ words are tainted by cowardice or treachery—›

He paused, and without moving a muscle somehow conveyed the sense of a scorpion ready to strike, a viper coiling in its burrow. ‹Well. It is inevitable that you will _wonder._ But you will not _conclude_ that it is so. You will heed my words of caution, and when your neighbors speak the same, you will know that they speak with the voice of reason, and rationality, and doubt.›

He gestured, and with a smooth, practiced step, they moved into view of the camera, stood shoulder to shoulder—Tom and Rachel, their faces set in identical masks of grim determination.

‹These are humans,› Elfangor said. ‹Denizens of Earth, and the current target of the Visser. They are weak, but nimble. Slow-thinking, but clear-seeing. They have flight, and spaceflight, and nuclear power, and electromagnetic communication. And there are more than _seven billion of them._ ›

I felt a quick tightening of fear, in the quiet corner that was my own part of our shared mind. That last bit hadn’t been a number, but rather a multilayered, overlapped vision of a thousand different Andalites—standing aboard spaceships, running through fields, sleeping inside of little hobbitlike scoops carved out of grassy hillsides—and each and every one of them had been surrounded by a dozen shadowy, human-shaped figures.

‹It is on their world that the third way was found, and proven. Coexistence between Yeerk and host—true symbiosis, rather than suppression or slavery. The humans’ battle is not yet finished. Peace has not been achieved, and they may yet go the way of the Hork-Bajir. But they _will_ pour forth from their world, either as the allies of the Yeerks or as their vassals, whether one revolution hence or seven. And when they do, we will be too few, too tired, too scattered to resist.›

He leaned forward, and the Berensons shifted to make room, our three heads close in the heavy silence. ‹We must teach the Yeerks that we are reasonable _before_ that happens,› the war-prince said. ‹Before they have nothing further to gain by listening, and no reason to fear our vengeance. We must abandon our indignation, the drive for satisfaction that leads ever-downward to our destruction—the juvenile fantasy that transgressions against us may never go unpunished, that we have an unchallengeable power to demand redress for our grievances.›

Something— _shifted_ —and suddenly there was another Andalite standing before me, with dark fur and a long, azure scar cutting across the slits of his nose—not real, not actually visible, but in memory projected so clearly that it was like a hologram.

‹We will remove this threat of which you speak,› declared the alien, its voice heavy with authority. ‹Seven billion is not so many when they are all gathered on a single world. All it takes is a simple rock.›

The vision faded, and Elfangor lowered our tail to the deck, the exposed bone of the blade giving a soft _tink_ as it made contact with the cold metal.

‹I do not know what madness grips the mind of Lirem-Arrepoth-Terrouss,› he said softly. ‹I do know that Lirem seeks to protect the Andalite people, and to do his duty with honor and fortitude. I believe he acts with conviction, and that his motives are what many would call good.›

Elfangor raised our hands, placed them upon the shoulders of the two humans. ‹But Lirem does not look beyond the curving of the Path. Does not think clearly about what might lurk beyond the horizon. There are things we do not do—things which, once done, cannot be undone, and whose consequences echo across the stars. There was a time, perhaps, when the destruction of Earth might have been carried out in silence—might have meant the ending of this line of possibility, and the eventual victory of our people.›

 _I came to deny them their prize,_ he had said—that first night, in the construction site, so long ago. _Armed with a weapon that should have burned your world to a cinder._

‹But no longer. It is no longer an anonymous world floating invisibly in the infinite dark. The Yeerks have staked their claim, the humans have drawn their battle lines, and the time for quick and easy answers is done. If the Earth were to be ended _now—_ ›

He broke off, lowering his arms before continuing. ‹You _know_ why it is not done,› he said flatly. ‹Why it is _never_ done, why it _must not_ be done. If we make our enemy truly desperate—if we teach them that our ruthlessness has no limit, that their only choice is between savagery and extinction—›

He broke off again. ‹The Yeerks know the location of _our_ homeworld,› he said flatly. ‹Thus far, they have held back, not wishing for _us_ to destroy _theirs_. But if we show ourselves reckless, remorseless—if we leave our enemy _no_ viable path to survival save our own annihilation—they have less to fear than we, from a policy of total war. We can not spread as quickly as they can, nor take root half so easily. And look—›

He gestured around himself, at the smooth walls and silvery deck. ‹The humans have Z-space capability as well, now. Stolen from the Yeerks, but it will not be long before they understand it for themselves. And while they have no reason to hate us _yet_ , neither have they any reason to hold back, if we make ourselves their enemies.›

The Elfangor in my head didn’t remember that night—the first night, when he’d recruited us to be his dead hand. The memory hadn’t had time to encode itself before we acquired him—he didn’t remember pulling the trigger on his doomsday device, didn’t remember being shot down by the Visser’s ships, didn’t remember five human kids too stupid to run away when an alien ship decloaked in front of them.

But he _did_ remember thinking—days earlier, as his ship slid through hyperspace—that there was no way his weapon _could_ work. Not unless Jake Berenson and Cassie Withers and Tobias Yastek and Marco Levy had already been taken, were already off-planet somehow.

After all, there’d been a prophecy, and no matter what you did, the Ellimist _always_ won.

‹And so—›

The war-prince paused, standing stiff and upright, all four eyes turned forward as if facing judgment.

‹And so, I have chosen to give these humans the coordinates of the Andalite homeworld myself. If we destroy their planet—and if, out of fear, the Yeerks do not take vengeance themselves—the survivors will destroy ours, and then there will be _none_ left to challenge the Visser as he darkens the Great Path with his shadow.›

It wasn’t true, strictly speaking. Elfangor hadn’t _actually_ given us the coordinates, and there was still our promise to the Chee. But there was always the other ship, and since we could pull the coordinates out of his head whenever we wanted—

I had wondered whether we would be able to convince him in time. Whether the two-hour time limit was long enough for us to bring him around, or whether I’d just have to fake his personality, try to deliver the message myself.

But then Ax had pressed our heads together, and suddenly there had been _six_ of us in there—me and Elfangor and Ax and strange, partial shadows of Temrash and Tom and _another_ copy of Elfangor—

As it turned out, it only takes about three seconds to make a _dain._

‹This is Elfangor’s Trust,› the war-prince continued. ‹Not of these humans, but of _you_ , my people. I trust you to see beyond the quick and easy, to look past the immediate and the obvious and consider the _consequences._ Lirem-Arrepoth-Terrouss would sacrifice seven billion aliens to save the Andalites from extinction, and I cannot say for certain that this is a mistake—in _principle._ ›

I couldn’t help it—I twitched one eye away, just for a moment, to the place where Erek the Chee stood silently, watching over the operation, his hologram back in place, but its expression no less cold and mechanical.

‹In _practice,_ though, it is the desperate flailing of the youngling who cuts his own leg as he attempts to frighten the monster away. Consider that we were provoked into this war in the first place—that our very involvement was the design of the Visser, and that we have each step of the way allowed ourselves to be prodded into playing the part he wishes us to play. And now, in an hour of desperation, we become aware of a singular threat—a threat as yet confined to the surface of one defenseless world—do you think it is _coincidence_ that this fruit is dangled before us? That we are _invited_ to take the obvious path, employ the obvious solution? Have you any doubt that the blood of those seven billion would eventually trickle down to taint the grasses of our fields, our homes?›

The war-prince closed all four of his eyes, reopening them slowly in the Andalite gesture that was the equivalent of a shaken head. ‹No,› he said. ‹No. It must not be. Two paths lie before us—one old and familiar, the other new and unknown. Along the first, there is only death, and death, and more death—a war that ends with each of us as either conqueror or slave. And along the other—›

_This meeting was not by chance, and if there are few paths to victory, at least be assured that you walk upon the widest._

There was a memory in Elfangor’s mind which I couldn’t access, which I hadn’t been able to penetrate any of the dozen times I’d dug through his past. I could see that it was there—feel the shape of it, trace the way that it had influenced his thoughts and actions after the fact—but the actual content of it was hidden from me by a blank wall that Elfangor himself didn’t even know was there.

The day _after_ that hidden memory, he’d left Alloran. Had resigned his commission, surrendered his rank, and dropped out of the Andalite military, throwing away a future as the most promising protégé of the most brilliant strategist of the past thousand years—

—just hours before the message from Seerow’s expedition had summoned Alloran away to the Yeerk homeworld.

‹Along the other, I do not know. But that is the Path we must follow, if we are to avoid the trap that fate has set for us. Think long, my people—think long, choose wisely, breathe deep, and seek peace.›

 

*        *        *

 

“Did he say anything else?” Jake asked quietly, as the last of the blue fur withered and shrank beneath my emerging olive skin.

 _I do not think that this gambit will work, Marco Levy. My people are not much like yours—they are unaccustomed to confusion, and slow to change direction. It took half a year for them to commit to this war in the first place, with all of the fire and fury of the Visser for encouragement. And the Chancellor will argue that this message does not_ prove _that you have Z-space capability. It may be that we have accomplished nothing at all. It may be that we have made things worse._

“Just that we shouldn’t count on it,” I said. “As for the rest—”

 _No. I will not attempt to strategize on your behalf in the game between the Ellimist and Crayak. You will find that I am sufficiently skilled to prevent myself from doing so accidentally, while you eavesdrop. To discourage you from trying anyway, and from digging any further through my memories than you already have, I point out that it is not unreasonable to posit that your previous use of me is what cost you the life of Cassie Withers, and I wager the consequences of_ that _disaster have not yet fully been felt._

“—nothing new.”

Jake nodded, biting his lip. “You sure you still want to go through with this?”

I shrugged. “Somebody’s got to,” I said, “and it damn sure isn’t going to be _you._ ”

“Tobias and Garrett—”

“Ha.” I shook my head, leaning forward as I lowered my voice. “What happened the last five times Tobias was in a high-pressure spot?”

“That’s not really fair.”

“Still, though.”

“Okay, so it wasn’t great that he crashed the Bug fighter—”

“Or that he punched you in the face in the Yeerk pool. Or that he went and added Garrett to the team unilaterally. Or that he just _gave_ them Thàn and Serenity, out of the blue, when he didn’t have to—”

“He did that to get _you_ out of the hole you’d dug yourself into—”

“Yeah, I know, I crossed the line, too. The difference is, I _know_ where the line is. Tobias—”

“He’s pulled through for us every time. Without him we wouldn’t have made contact with Ax, we wouldn’t have found Paul, we wouldn’t have found Thàn—”

“I know. I know, okay? I get it. But this—this one needs to go like clockwork. No surprises. And besides, you going to tell me it would be a _bad_ thing if Tobias and Garrett stuck around for a while? Actually got to be part of the team for once, instead of always being off doing their own thing?”

Jake grimaced. “Tom, then.”

I scoffed. “You want to go that route, try Rachel,” I countered. “At least _she’s_ learned not to put her hand on hot stoves. But I have the feeling you’re going to want her around in case Tyagi—”

I broke off as Jake’s eyes shifted to look over my shoulder, turned to see the Tyagi clone approaching, her two Secret Service agents trailing her.

“Update?” Jake asked.

“Aximili is finished with the hyperdrive,” she said. “He says the cradle should be here within half an hour, at which point all that’s left is the remote piloting systems.”

Jake nodded. “Rachel?” he called out. “Updated ETA?”

“Three hours, ten minutes,” she answered. “I had Erek look at the data—he says it’s something like ninety-six percent the Visser’s headed straight to the ground. Moon’s almost on the other side of the planet, and his course doesn’t make sense if he’s planning to stop by the mothership first.”

“Tight,” I murmured.

“It’ll work,” Jake said. “Kodep says he can get you there in about eighty minutes, right? And on our end—as long as nothing really nuts happens, we’ll have the tech dropped off in Washington by sundown.”

“Washington?”

Jake nodded. “Tyagi came through. While you were transmitting. She’s—well, she’s not _happy,_ not with any of it. But she signed off, so long as we deliver the hyperdrive.”

“And she’s okay with—”

I gestured.

“Don’t act surprised,” said the clone. “We’re the same person, after all. Besides, no point in having extra lives if you’re not willing to spend them.”

I let out a breath. “I guess that’s everything, then.”

Jake frowned. “Are you really not going to—”

“Don’t,” I said, cutting him off. “He chose them, all right? I can’t—I just—”

I gave up. It would take too many words. “Just don’t,” I finished lamely.

Jake didn’t say anything, just held out his arms for a hug. I stepped forward, my head pressing up against his collarbone as I felt his chin rest above my ear.

“Don’t die,” he whispered.

“Shut up,” I said. “It’s a recon mission. Nobody’ll ever know we were there. And besides, we’ll have Kodep with us.”

He squeezed me tighter, and I took in a deep breath through my nose, letting his scent fill my nostrils. “See you tomorrow,” he whispered.

And then, louder, letting me go—

“All right, everybody. Let’s do it.”

 

*        *        *

 

“Scared, kid?” I asked, as the Andalite escape pod slid smoothly into the dawn sky, fading into transparency as it cleared the lowest clouds. A few seconds later, the Bug fighter flickered, then vanished, its own cloaking field powering up.

“No,” said David.

There was a short pause.

“Yes.”

I smiled. “Scared is good,” I said. “Scared means you haven’t totally lost it yet.”

Turning, I nodded to the last remaining Chee, Kodep—or at least, the last one that I could see, since for all I knew there were a hundred of the damn things hiding under holograms all around us. “Ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” it said.

“Here we go.”

Closing my eyes, I focused my mind and felt the changes begin.

You know those electron microscope pictures? The ones where you can see, like, bugs and ball point pens and microchips, all up close? They’re all clean and sharp and brightly colored, and even gross things like mosquitos and mold and sperm start to look elegant and beautiful, full of symmetry and intricate detail.

Well. It’s one thing to see a housefly up close on a screen, and it’s another thing entirely to feel an extra pair of legs bursting out of your stomach.

I kept my eyes closed as long as possible—as bad as it is to watch yourself transforming into a bug, it’s even worse when there’s someone right next to you going through the same thing—but at some point, my eyelids disappeared and I had no _choice_ but to watch.

My skin, melting like candle wax, then blackening, hardening, and finally peeling like old paint as a thousand tiny hairs split off from the layer of chitin.

David, two feet tall and slowly shrinking, looking as if he’d vomited up his own esophagus, a long, fleshy tube dangling out of his face where his mouth should’ve been.

A feeling like being cut open under surgical anesthetic, a sort of numb, distant pain as huge vertical gashes appeared down my back, my flesh splitting into a pair of giant, veiny wings.

Morphing wasn’t _always_ a nightmare. Once, when Cassie was demorphing from an osprey, she’d managed to keep her wings right up until the very last second—had stood there, looking like an angel, everything completely human except for a halo of feathers around her forehead and a pair of four-foot wings where her arms should’ve been. That had been downright _cool_.

But this—

I was pretty sure I could’ve _heard_ my bones dissolving, if I’d still had ears.

Fortunately, my vision disconnected at about the halfway point, the fly’s compound eyes sending signals too complicated for my still-human visual cortex to interpret. By the time my sense of sight came back online, the morph was complete.

‹Incoming,› I broadcast to Kodep as I launched upward from the ground, David echoing his own confirmation. ‹Where should we latch on?›

The android was a giant the size of the Statue of Liberty, wrapped in an ever-shifting aura of shimmering, rainbow color, but the fly was a turbo-powered rocket on steroids, and we covered the distance to head height in about two-thirds of a second. As we circled around—at what felt like about eight hundred miles per hour—a small, rectangular area on the giant’s shoulder lit up, shining like the surface of the sun.

‹There?› I asked.

The area blinked once.

‹Roger.›

In a split second, I was there, balanced and motionless on the patch of smooth, white porcelain—

‹Aaaaaaaand I just threw up. Sorry, Kodep.›

There was a series of short, truncated vibrations that my human brain interpreted as laughter and my fly brain interpreted as MORTAL PERIL. Then the air around me tightened and froze, and we were off.

‹David, you good?›

‹Yeah.›

There was very little sense of motion, either because Kodep had some kind of inertial force field or because the acceleration was gradual and steady. But even with the fly’s shattered, kaleidoscopic vision and the half-transparent hologram, I could tell that we were going _fast._

We’d landed that—well, it _would’ve_ been afternoon, back in California, but out here it was the middle of the night—on a tiny, nameless island in Indonesia, maybe four hundred miles away from the Visser’s predicted landing site, the closest we’d been comfortable getting given that we didn’t know what kinds of ship-detecting technology he might have stolen or invented.

Team A had been Jake and not-Tyagi, who had quickly reestablished contact with the U.S. military through some kind of one-time use protocol the real Tyagi had set up in advance, in case of emergency. There’d been two major topics of discussion—the reaction to Telor’s betrayal, and plans to take action on the Visser’s imminent arrival. As it turned out, Tyagi was already planning to leave the Visser alone, for the same reason that Project Ultra had let Nazi U-boats continue to sink Allied convoys. She hadn’t been thrilled that _we_ were going, but she reluctantly acknowledged the need for intel.

 _And the fact that there’s nothing she can do to_ stop _us,_ Tobias had pointed out.

Less clear was whether—or how—Tyagi would react if Telor started trying to snatch up people or resources. We’d told her about our plan to make a broadcast to the Andalite civilian population, once we’d confirmed that Elfangor knew how to get through, but like Elfangor himself, she wasn’t counting on the Andalite war machine listening to reason. According to Tobias, it was possible that she might _help_ if Telor started going nuts, just to maximize the number of humans who ultimately made it off-world.

Team B had been Ax, Tobias, and Garrett, who—along with some mechanical help from Kodep—had begun the process of stripping down the Bug fighter and turning it into a remotely pilotable drone ship, disconnecting the Z-space drive and setting up independent power sources for the two Dracon cannons. They’d left the shields and cloaking device intact, since the ship would be basically useless if it got shot out of the sky before reaching its target, but the hyperdrive—the core of the MAD deterrent—would be dropped off in Washington, along with the two Secret Service agents.

Ax had also remote-summoned his personal ship, the little escape pod he called his cradle. It was small, and cramped, and had barely enough fuel left for a single, one-way trip to space, but that was all that my dad and the Tyagi clone would need to make their way up to the Yeerk mothership.

It was a bit of a gamble, sending them up without warning—though not as much of a gamble as sending them up at all, in the first place—but we’d decided that was safer than drawing attention to them while they were sitting in a ship with no maneuverability and no weapons. Once they made it into visual range of Telor’s ship—and while the Visser was hopefully on the ground on the other side of the planet—they’d drop their cloak and try to establish contact via radio, at which point the pair of them would try their best to play envoy while the real Tyagi did the same down below.

That left Team D, which was me, David, and Kodep. The broadcast with Elfangor had been a long shot—probably worth doing, but mostly just a way to kill time while the others finished up their work. Now, we were on our way to Vietnam, to watch—from a distance—as the Visser did whatever it was he was there to do.

 _No,_ Ax had said. _I’m not sure what he’s up to. It doesn’t seem likely that he’s planting bombs, for instance, since he can just bombard the planet from orbit. Maybe he’s seeding some kind of terraforming biotech, or setting up self-replicating robotic manufactories? Or just leaving behind caches of supplies, in case of unexpected contingencies? But in_ that _case, I’m not sure why the double visits—it seems like the first Bug fighter could do most of that on its own…_

We’d considered sending a team to check out one of the previous sites, but there hadn’t been time to do that _and_ get into position, and we wanted to be morphed and settled in long before the Visser actually showed up. So that particular job had been outsourced to the Chee, who claimed they would let us know via Kodep if there was anything relevant about the other sites. I had started to point out that we’d have no way of verifying the information, at least during the critical window, but—

 _We can’t keep obsessing over whether or not we trust them,_ Jake had snapped—silently, in thought-speak, while we bustled around on the moonlit beach. His voice had been brusque and hard, brooking no disagreement. _They showed themselves to us when they didn’t have to. They’ve saved our lives more than once. They’ve done everything we’ve asked—everything they_ could _do, given their programming. And let’s be real—they can round us up any time they want to. If they weren’t on our side, we’d already be captured, or dead._

It was basically the same deal as the Ellimist.   There was nothing we could do about it, so there was no point in worrying.

And so David and I found ourselves in fly morph, held tight inside a force field as Kodep churned through the South China sea at maybe three hundred miles per hour, heading for a tiny clearing in the jungles of Vietnam.

I’d worried at first that we’d be picked up by submarines, but Kodep had said that our passage would be almost silent—he would extend the force field out in front of us in a long, narrow cone, like the tip of a lance, and nudge the water gently aside a second or so before passing through the gap. It would make no more noise than a small whale, and the whole thing would be hidden from sight by hologram.

I’d shivered a little, hearing that. It was the same sort of premonition I’d gotten about Serenity, a sense of danger waiting in the wings—the Chee were unbelievably, insanely powerful, and while there really might _not_ be anything we could do about it if they turned against us, it didn’t quite seem like _not thinking about it_ was the correct response.

Ax had seemed to think he could destroy them, given the right tools—such as the two Dracon cannons we’d just scavenged from the Bug fighter—but there was a big difference between being theoretically capable of pulling it off, and actually being able to do it under real-life combat conditions. There were _thousands_ of them, after all.

I continued musing as we surged through the water, my mind wandering from threat to threat, target to target, assembling half-baked plans and then tearing them down. The rush of blue filled my vision—sunlight scattering off the waves, then trickling through the hologram, then finally being broken into a thousand pieces by the fly’s compound eyes. The effect was hypnotic, and after the first half hour, I felt myself drifting in and out—between the rendezvous and all of the stuff that had gone down at Edwards, it had been maybe four days since I’d gotten any real sleep—

‹Marco,› said David, jerking me out of my reverie.

‹Mmm?›

‹Can I ask you a question?›

‹Shoot,› I said, trying to shake off my fatigue.

There was a long silence, and I wondered what David was thinking—whether he was searching for the right words, or mustering up the courage, or what.

 _You sure you don’t want more backup on this one?_ Rachel had asked.

 _If this goes south, I want us to be exposed as little as possible_.

_Then why take the kid?_

‹You didn’t say goodbye to your dad.›

I waited, but he didn’t say anything else.

‹Well,› I answered, choosing my words carefully. ‹My dad and I have a—uh— _complicated_ relationship.›

I waited again, to see if David wanted to take that in any particular direction, but the other boy remained silent.

‹My mom died a couple of years ago,› I explained. ‹Disappeared. Her sailboat—there was a storm. Dad, he—he pretty much fell apart, after that. I was your age, maybe, ten going on eleven, and he stopped going to work, stopped paying the bills. Some weeks he forgot to buy food. And I—he wasn’t—›

I faltered, feeling the beginnings of a wave of emotion I couldn’t quite identify. ‹I mean, it’s not like he didn’t care,› I said. ‹At least, I think he cared. Or wanted to, at least. But, like, I’d lost my _mom_ , you know? It wasn’t just him who’d—›

I broke off again, the pressure in me building, as if each word was adding to it instead of letting it out. ‹For like two years, he didn’t—he just wasn’t—wasn’t _there,_ not for me, not for anybody. Like he was just _gone,_ like there was just this zombie where my dad used to be. And I was trying to deal with it all, my mom being—being gone, and school and stuff, and then on top of it I had to start taking care of _him,_ not just money and bills but, like, making sure he didn’t—he wasn’t going to—›

If I’d been in my own, human body, I would’ve sucked in a breath. ‹I guess I just never—never really _forgave_ him for it,› I said. ‹I mean—that was like, Jake was getting to have a childhood, Jake and Rachel and everybody else, and I was just—just keeping track, learning how to keep track of all of it. And then all of a sudden he starts getting _better_ , like he’s coming back, and then it turns out it’s just because there was a fucking Yeerk in his head, screwing with his brain chemistry or—or—or just _making_ him be less shitty, I don’t know, and I thought—I thought I had—I thought he was—›

I paused. It had suddenly occurred to me that I was the only one talking—that David had said basically one sentence, and then all of this had come pouring out—

‹I thought I was getting him back,› I said simply. ‹I thought I was getting him back, finally, but no, he just wants to go up _there,_ he _wants_ a fucking slug in his brain, running his whole life, and I just—I just can’t. I can’t deal with that shit. I _won’t.›_

The strength of the last word took me by surprise as it emerged from my brain, as it slid through the æther and over to David, but I didn’t call it back or correct it. There’d been too much going on over the past week for me to really think about it, but I _was_ mad—had been mad for a while—and then this morning, after everything, when I found out that he _wanted_ to go, that he’d rather turn his body over to Telor than stick around—that he was going to abandon me _again_ —

Yeah. I was feeling it, now—was swept up in it, the hurt and the heartbreak and the rage. For _two years_ I’d kept us afloat, kept us together, sacrificing half my childhood to keep him from falling apart, and now this—

‹My dad—›

I twitched, David’s words snapping me out of my inner monologue, yanking me back into the world—

‹He hit you,› I said, after it became clear that David wasn’t going to finish the thought.

‹Not just me.›

‹Your mom, too?›

‹Yeah. Until—until she left. Left—left me—›

‹Left you with him,› I said, and as I said the words I _felt_ it, felt the fear and loss and confusion like it was all brand-new, and my rage—

— _shifted—_

—I felt my rage move, felt it grow, felt it stretch out to wrap around David, too—not to consume him, but to protect him, a wall of fire to shield us both from—from—from the shittiness, the sheer _unfairness_ of it all, Tobias and Garrett didn’t have parents either but at least they’d _known_ that they didn’t, instead of having the rug pulled out from under them, finding out that it was all a lie, an illusion, just smoke and ashes—

It was like a dam was breaking, somewhere inside of me, a sudden flood of bile and poison that I’d sealed up so tight I’d _almost_ forgotten it was there—

‹He killed—›

The thought was short—broken, with an edge like a knife—and something told me to wait, this time—to give him space, say nothing, let him come to it himself, when he was ready.

‹He—I had this, this— _Henry_ , I had this hermit crab, his name was Henry, and he just—just—›

‹It’s okay,› I said, even though it was not at all okay.

‹He _killed_ him, and he—he—he made me, made me _look—›_

‹Fuck him,› I said, putting every last ounce of my weight behind the words, every bit of strength and conviction I could muster through my growing horror. The words weren’t enough, the _sentiment_ wasn’t enough, but it was all I could offer—

‹Fuck him, David,› I repeated. ‹I don’t—I mean, I can’t even _begin_ to understand what—what you went through, what that was like, but _fuck. Him._ Okay?›

‹I—›

‹Seriously. Everything you’re feeling right now—›

I couldn’t find the words. To know that he was—he was _allowed_ to be mad, allowed to be torn up about it, that it wasn’t his fault, he didn’t have to hide it—

‹I’m glad he’s dead.›

‹No shit,› I said, without even a second’s hesitation. My rage had shifted entirely, was no longer connected to my own story, my own suffering, which seemed pale and small in comparison—was now a bright ring of light and heat with only David at its center. ‹You _should_ feel glad. He sounds like he was a piece of shit.›

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a tiny voice was whispering, trying to catch my attention—was pointing out that I _might_ be projecting a little, might be jumping to conclusions, putting too much stock in the word of this ten-year-old-kid—but I ignored it. David didn’t need my skepticism, didn’t need my doubts—I remembered _that_ all too well, the looks in the eyes of the teachers, the counselors—even _Jake_ , sometimes—even Jake had never really believed me, never really _listened—_

‹I knew I was going to kill him,› David whispered. ‹When he came at me, and I morphed—I picked, picked the lion—picked it on purpose—›

A part of me froze, at that—stopped, turning to ice on the surface—but then the flood broke through anyway. If a ten-year-old kid had been pushed _that far—_ that just made it _worse—_

‹You did what you had to do,› I said, my voice still steady.

What else could I say? I mean, given the number of people that _I’d_ killed—

_I hit hard, one foot on the man’s shoulder, the other on the top of his skull. I felt bone give way in both places, felt the impact shiver up my legs as he plunged into the water, the waves closing in around me—_

‹You did what you had to do,› I repeated grimly. ‹Don’t you ever feel guilty about that, okay? Sometimes—sometimes that’s the only way.›

There was a long, long silence. Long enough for me to think that the conversation was over, that David was closing up again, rebuilding the walls that kept all of it in—

‹Yeah,› he whispered.

Another silence, as all around us the blue light shattered into crystal shards and streamed past us at warp speed.

‹Thanks for—for letting me in,› he said, the words sounding small and vulnerable. ‹When you looked inside my head, I thought—›

He broke off, and I felt another wash of anger at the now-dead Jeremiah Poznanski.

‹Thanks,› he repeated. ‹For not—I didn’t think, if you knew—thank you for giving me—for letting me have—›

‹You deserve it, kid,› I said. ‹Really. If anybody deserves to—to _not_ have to be afraid anymore—›

I trailed off.

David said nothing.

We rode the rest of the way in silence.

 

*        *        *

 

‹There—do you see it?›

I scanned the sky from my hiding place and shook my head.

‹Coming in between those two hills, about halfway up—›

“Kodep,” I whispered. “Can you see it?”

_Bzzzzzz._

“Are we good?”

_Bzzzzzz._

I was lying flat on my belly on the top of a giant, house-sized boulder, all overgrown with moss and vines and a riot of small plants, peering out between the leaves that hid me almost completely from view. Kodep was beside me, his hologram providing an extra layer of concealment. David was in osprey morph two hundred yards away, deep within the branches of a drooping, wide-leafed tree.

It had taken us a few passes to be sure we’d found the right place. There was a string of small clearings near the coordinates Rachel had given us, like a row of bright, inverted islands in between the dark jungle hills. It had been David who’d spotted the smoking gun—a trio of fresh, shield-shaped depressions sunk into the grass to one side of the largest clearing, the footprint of the scout fighter’s landing pads. Kodep had scanned the area for five minutes, looking for any sort of alarm or recording device or booby trap, but there had been nothing.

‹You can’t see it at all?› David asked.

I shook my head again, not sure whether he could still see it or whether Kodep had extended the hologram to hide me completely. As far as _I_ could tell, the sky was totally empty.

‹He’s coming in slow,› David said. ‹Looks like he’s heading for the exact same spot, actually. Watch the grass.›

I watched, feeling my heartrate rising—

‹How about now?›

I nodded.

Without warning, without any sound at all, the three depressions had just— _vanished_ , the Visser’s ship’s hologram replacing the bent and crushed grass with an image of upright, gently swaying stalks.

_Thorough._

‹I’m not seeing any movement,› David reported.

“Kodep?” I whispered.

_Bzzzzzz. Bzzzzzz._

This was the moment of truth. If the Visser had some means of detecting us—if he could see the morph control signal, like the Chee could, or could trace the wave in Z-space like Serenity, then David was about to have a very bad time.

The _original_ plan had called for _me_ to be the one in morph, with David in his own, human body a safe distance away, ready to report back to the others if anything went wrong.

But David had absolutely insisted, had refused to hear any argument, and in the end, I hadn’t had the heart to turn him down. It wasn’t like being unmorphed was all _that_ much safer—for the moment, I was still inside Kodep’s hologram, but if the Visser actually went after David, Kodep was going to be moving faster than I could keep up—

‹Still here, still nothing happening.›

Long minutes passed, with David checking in every thirty seconds or so—

‹Wait—›

I lifted myself up half an inch, peering through the thick leaves covering my face.

‹Something’s happening. Hatch opening, maybe?›

I still couldn’t see anyth—

Ah.

‹You see him?›

I nodded, the motion much more furtive than before.

The Visser had appeared out of nowhere, his form seeming to materialize from thin air as he stepped past the boundary of his ship’s cloaking field. He was larger than Ax—heavier, stronger looking, his tail maybe two feet longer, his shoulders a foot or so higher. He was completely hairless, his skin a dark, purplish brown, his muscles bulging and rippling as he straightened in the sunlight, his stalks searching in every direction. There were two bandoliers crossing his chest, each holding a pair of Dracon beams, and a utility belt fastened around his midsection with ten or so other objects dangling off of it.

‹What’s he doing?› David asked.

I didn’t answer, of course—just stayed as still as I could, watching through the gaps in the foliage, trying to convince myself that it was caution and sense that kept me so still, and not fear.

The Visser had dropped to all-sixes, in the position Ax called river-run, his main eyes pointed at the ground while his stalks continued to twist and swivel. He moved forward slowly, his head and shoulders drifting back and forth in an oddly familiar motion—

_Is he…smelling?_

Pausing, he lowered his head even closer to the ground, and after a moment he stepped forward again—stepped forward and pivoted, so that his right middle leg was directly over the spot he’d just been examining. Moving with deliberate precision, he placed the foot and stood still for a moment, muscles in his calf twitching—

‹He’s _eating?›_

It was true. As he stepped away, I could see that the grass where he’d placed his foot was shorter, had been chewed down to the root. He took a few more steps, then paused again—then a few more—a few more—a few more—

‹Either he’s got some kind of morph sensor, or he’s not afraid,› David observed. ‹I’m seeing lots of bugs and small critters nearby, and he’s ignoring them all.›

I said nothing—just continued to watch, the adrenaline in my veins fighting against the pain and fatigue of lying still on the sharp, volcanic stone. Even alone, moving sedately through the grass, the Visser conveyed a sense of strength, of threat—like a bull, a buffalo, ready to abandon at a moment’s notice the outward appearance of languor. Once, there was the sharp _crack_ of a stick breaking in the woods, and in an _instant_ he was upright, his movement so quick I hadn’t even registered it—a weapon in either hand, his tail poised and ready, main eyes frozen as if carved from stone while his stalks continued to sweep the terrain at his back.

 _Probably not shielded, then,_ said the part of me that was still processing things logically—the part that was _using_ logic as a distraction, that wanted to pretend it wasn’t terrified to be lying on a rock fifty yards away from the leader of the Yeerk invasion, the murderer of Elfangor, the architect of Ventura’s destruction—

I could feel every ounce of the tension in my shoulders, the maddening trickle of sweat down my back. I was starting to regret my caution, all of my careful, pessimistic planning—if I’d just brought a handheld shredder with me—

_No. No second-guessing. Just because it looks like it would’ve worked doesn’t mean it was the wrong move, given what you knew at the time. And besides—who’s to say he doesn’t have some kind of sensor that would’ve picked up a powered weapon? Ax said he’d be able to spot radioactive material a thousand miles away—_

A gun, then—

 _You don’t know how to_ shoot _a gun. You just want it to_ go away, _so you don’t have to be scared anymore._

That—okay, maybe—

_The plan worked. You know what he’s up to, and you aren’t dead. Stop second-guessing yourself and just sit tight._

Or at least, the plan had worked _so far._

After a time, the Visser stopped his slow grazing and reared up, centaur-like, stretching his forelegs in exactly the same way that a human would stretch their arms after spending an hour in a car. Twisting around to take in the landscape with all four eyes, he stretched out his tail and—

_He’s…jogging?_

Another half-hour passed in boredom and tension, as the arch-nemesis of the human race galloped and gallivanted around the clearing, from time to time disappearing behind rocks or trees or folds in the terrain, occasionally stopping to nibble some bush or flower or to dip a hoof into one of the many shallow, green pools dotting the clearing. I stayed as still as I could, listening to the stream of David’s reports, the air growing heavier around me as the sun climbed higher into the sky—

‹Okay,› David said. ‹It looks like he’s coming back.›

He came into view around a distant stand of willowy, white-barked trees, back down on all-sixes, moving at a pace somewhere between a walk and a run, his path direct and purposeful.

‹See him?›

I nodded fractionally—uselessly—careful not to move the collection of leaves that were keeping me hidden behind Kodep’s hologram.

‹Looks like—yeah, okay.›

Without pausing or breaking stride, the Visser moved straight toward the point where he’d first emerged, vanishing in the blink of an eye as he stepped across the boundary. An interminable five minutes followed, and then—

‹Taking off. Can you see?›

I couldn’t, any more than I’d been able to see him land earlier. But I _could_ see the moment when the cloaking field lifted off the ground, the upright grass vanishing and revealing the three crushed patches underneath.

We waited another half-hour before moving, as planned—right up to David’s time limit—and then—

‹Well, that was anticlimactic, wasn’t it?› David asked, as we huddled together on Kodep’s shoulder.

It had been, but—

‹Anti-climactic is good,› I said. ‹Anti-climactic is what we want.›

_Four or five of us, maybe, spaced out around the clearing—the tarantula hawk, or a cobra, or both—and some guns—maybe throw a grenade into the ship—_

I looked up at the sky as Kodep carried us forward through the jungle—at the wide open blue into which the Visser’s ship had vanished.

‹Besides, I have a feeling there’s going to be plenty of excitement soon enough.›

 

*        *        *

 

“He’s been coming down to Earth to _graze?”_

‹In hindsight, we should’ve thought of that, as a possibility. Yeerk ships aren’t designed with Andalite sensibilities in mind—they don’t have the large open spaces that keep us from getting—this isn’t quite the right word, but let’s say _cabin fever.›_

“But—in the middle of a _war—”_

‹Do you stop eating in the middle of a war? If you look at it from his point of view, he’s exercising caution and restraint—normally, an adult Andalite would graze at least twice a cycle—roughly every other day. And he’s selected his grazing sites at random, and he sends down a scout ship to give the all-clear, and he goes cloaked and armed—it makes sense to us.›

“But—but how do you even know if Earth plants are _edible?”_

‹Many of them aren’t, but few of them pose a _threat_ to an Andalite digestive tract. We’re guessing it’s more for the form of the activity than for actual sustenance.›

“This is fun and all,” I interrupted. “But—the war?”

“Ah, right—sorry. Uh. Short answers. Things are moving. Tyagi has the hyperdrive, she said thanks but she still isn’t exactly happy with us and we don’t know how much she’s not saying. Based on the Marauder’s Map, Ax thinks that she might be funneling resources up to the mothership already, using the other Bug fighter—”

“ _Wha—_ wait, no, okay. Okay, I get it. I get it, but— _seriously?”_

“Look at it from her point of view. If they decide the Andalite threat is still live, they’re going to start taking stuff anyway, and if they _do_ ally with us, we’re going to start sending support eventually. Politically, this is win-win.”

“That’s not _public,_ is it?”

“No, Tyagi—or Evans, I guess—they haven’t made any kind of public pronouncements yet. Nothing like the proposal she told Tobias about, anyway. I think they must still be negotiating.”

“So that whole betrayed-and-tried-to-kidnap-you thing—”

“Under the rug. Or under the bridge. Whichever. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything to be gained from making a stink about it.”

“Public opinion?”

“Public opinion is the world’s probably going to end in a year, not in eighteen days.”

I sighed. “None of this is good.”

Jake shrugged. “What else is new?”

“What about Visser Three?”

“If he’s tumbled to Telor, he’s playing it sly. Rachel’s been watching the map like a hawk, says everything looks the same as it has since Washington. He left Vietnam, stopped by the mothership for a few hours, did a few loops around the Earth, and is now back in that spot in deep space he keeps going to.”

“So basically, what’s going on is—”

“Nothing. Yeah.”

“That make sense to you?”

“Not really, no. We figure it means _somebody_ knows something we don’t. But we don’t know who, and we don’t know what.”

“Maybe Visser Three has some kind of tech that’ll block an asteroid? And that’s why they’re not worried?”

“Ax?”

‹Short answer is no way. We admit our knowledge here is limited, but—well, you’re just teenagers. What would _you_ say, if someone claimed to have an Iron Man suit that could withstand being in the middle of a nuclear blast?›

I felt a quiver of discomfort at Ax/Temrash casually tossing off a reference to human comic book characters, but I set it aside. “Speaking of tech the Visser’s got—”

‹Erek showed us pictures and spectrographic analysis of the equipment the Visser was carrying on his belt. We’ve identified almost all of it—there are just two items we can’t pin down.›

“What’s the rundown?”

‹Besides the four Dracon beams, he’s got two spare power packs, one emergency ration kit, one personal stunner, two stasis tubes—presumably with Yeerks inside—a Naharan mass-wave mapper that could conceivably be used to detect morphing indirectly, a handheld Z-space comm, and a—the closest word for it is _multitool.›_

“A Swiss Army knife.”

‹A technologically advanced version, yes. There’s also a scanner of a type that I suspect could be tuned to detect energetic particle activity—it would warn him of the presence of advanced weaponry unless that weaponry was specially shielded.›

“Would it detect a gun or a grenade?”

‹No, although it would detect either a nuclear bomb or any of the beam weapons we have at hand.›

“What about the two unidentified objects? Any guesses?”

‹One of them _may_ be a device for creating static shields by aligning charged atmospheric particles. It bears a certain resemblance to the object Rachel took off of his drone at the high school. The other—we’re not sure.›

I turned to look at Jake. “That’s—a lot.”

He nodded grimly. “I’m starting to reconsider the Chee,” he said quietly. “I know that rules out lethal strategies, but as I’ve been talking to Ax it seems less and less likely we could hit him with a missile anyway, and—I mean, we’re just like a _billion_ times more likely to pull this off, with their help.”

“So what would the plan be—provoke him into violence, just like on the Bug fighter?”

“It’s either that, or we go back to maybe doing this together with the military.”

“We _know_ we can get close with morphs and with Chee technology,” I pointed out. “We _don’t_ know that we can get close with anything else. And if we blow this once—he’s not stupid. He’ll just build himself a greenhouse out on Mars.”

_Which—why hasn’t he done that already?_

“The other alternative is leaving it up to the military entirely.”

I was silent for a moment. That had occurred to me maybe a dozen times on the long trip across the Pacific. Certainly it seemed like the easier option. And if I was right that we had been under unnatural pressure the day before, then it would make sense _not_ to do the thing that they—whoever they were—wanted us to do, even after a delay.

But—

Would it _work?_

“Look,” I said. “I’m all for _not_ going toe-to-toe with Visser Three. Just _watching_ him gave me the creeps, and that was with Kodep keeping me safe and shielded. Listening to Rachel talk about how he was at the high school—and that wasn’t even his real body—”

I shrugged. “In the end, the only thing that matters is pulling it off. Do we think they have better odds than us?”

“Normally, I’d say yes,” Jake said. “I mean, this is literally what they do, right? But—”

He glanced over his shoulder, to where Erek and Rachel were sitting side by side, poking at the Marauder’s Map. “Tyagi’s ready to fold. I think—I think she’ll do whatever it takes to get a few million humans off planet, even if it means letting the Visser win outright. I mean, she already pretty much caved to Telor, after they double-crossed her in the desert.”

 _And maybe it’s better for all of us to die than for that to happen._ “So what, then?” I asked.

“Like I said, I’ve been thinking about the Chee. It feels to me like they’re the difference between a hail Mary and a sure thing, or at least as close to a sure thing as we’re gonna get. And they won’t work with the military.”

“But they’ll work with _us?”_

Jake nodded. “We kept our promise with the Bug fighter,” he said. “And they’re already on board for the Serenity strike, to make sure there’s no collateral damage.”

I bit my lip, looking back and forth between Jake and Ax.

‹Listen,› I said, switching to thought-speak. ‹I know I’ve said this a bunch of times, and I know, Tobias had a point about tying ourselves in knots, but—the Chee _know_ about the deadline. Right? I mean, Erek and Rictic were there at the rendezvous when Tyagi explained it to Dragar.›

‹Yeah,› Jake said, and from his tone I could tell that he’d seen it, too.

I shifted my gaze to Ax. ‹If they _are_ just playing along—this is the time to betray us,› I said. ‹This is the time they’ll pull the rug out. If the Andalites don’t back down—Visser Three is their absolute best hope for saving all the dogs. If we’re right, and he really is courting them—›

‹Except that we _can_ get the Andalites to back down if he’s dead,› Jake argued.

‹The Chee can’t count on that, though. They probably can’t even _think_ about that.›

‹Captured, then. It’s the same thing—if we can get the Visser out of the picture—›

‹There’s still no guarantee the Andalites will call off the strike. They didn’t call it off _yet,_ right, Ax?›

‹No,› Ax answered. ‹They did not. But it _has_ become a source of political debate, and the Council may be overridden—›

‹There’s no guarantee of _anything,_ › Jake interrupted, his voice rising. ‹ _None of this is clear cut._ But we have to do _something._ This is the _one_ edge we’ve got.›

‹Then that’s the question,› I said. ‹Right? I mean, we’ve got two days, don’t we?›

‹If he sticks to the same pattern, yeah. If nothing insane happens before then. Which, let’s be real—›

‹Yeah, yeah. But okay, fine—those are the options. Us with the Chee, us without the Chee, us with U.S. support, the U.S. by themselves.›

‹Or nothing. Something else, instead.›

‹Or something else. But that’s it—that’s our job for the next two days, is to sit down and think this through.›

 

*        *        *

 

‹Tobias here. Map just went offline—›

I felt an electric jolt of apprehension that seemed to pass through every cell of my body.

‹—looks like Rachel and the others got through. Ditching the tablet now, over.›

_Here we go._

‹Marco here,› I broadcast. ‹Before you go—what was the final ETA? Over.›

‹It read nine minutes right before it died, so call it eight and a half, to be safe. I’ll be back in range in three, over.›

‹Jake. In position, still good to go. Marco? David?›

‹Marco here. I’m all set, over.›

‹David here. I’m in a good spot, but it’s definitely harder to see than we thought, over.›

‹Jake. Tobias will guide you. Just sit tight. Checking in with the Chee now—›

Shifting in place, I noticed that my hood had come open of its own accord, the king cobra’s body responding instinctively to the tension I was feeling. For a moment, I thought about trying to force myself to relax—

_Fuck it. No point._

We were about to go into battle with possibly the most dangerous creature in the entire galaxy. It would be _wrong_ to be relaxed.

‹—Chee are all set, over.›

There were six of them, in total—one at each point of the compass, and two of them covering Jake, who was standing exposed near the center of the clearing, wearing only his morph armor. We’d gone back and forth over whether to bring more, but as Erek had pointed out, if six of the androids couldn’t cut it, bringing _more_ just meant creating more casualties.

‹Erek’s on the countdown. Eight minutes. Over.›

I flexed the cobra’s muscles, fighting the urge to move, to hide. My mind was racing, looping over and over again, uselessly reviewing every memory, every step of the plan, everything that could possibly be relevant, searching for meaning and detail.

_If we all die in eight minutes, why did it happen?_

Betrayal by the Chee, detection by the Visser, intervention by the Ellimist, some weapon we hadn’t anticipated, the arrival of U.S. military forces, the arrival of Telor’s forces, a nuclear blast, getting crushed by the Visser’s ship, getting spotted by the Visser and murdered just because, getting knocked unconscious and sleeping past the time limit, getting eaten by a fox—

‹Seven and a half.›

Had we made the right choice, bringing the Chee? Had we made the right choice, leaving Tyagi in the dark? Had we made the right choice, bringing David and Tobias and sending Tom and Rachel and Garrett and Ax to take out Serenity? Had we made the right choice, coming without weapons of any kind?

‹Seven›

I could feel the pressure mounting, each second magnifying my doubt, my uncertainty. Had I missed something, had I forgotten something, had I gotten something wrong, there were seven minutes left, we could still pull the plug—

— _no, you can’t, Serenity’s gone, there’s no way to track him now, you burned that bridge for good—_

—okay, but we could still bail, we should get _out_ of there, it was crazy to do this in person when we hadn’t even _tried_ sending in a missile yet—

‹Six and a half.›

‹Tobias here. I’m back in range. Still no visual contact, over.›

I twisted my body to look up, the cobra’s vision every bit as sharp as a human’s but with additional sensitivity in the infrared, so that the clear Wyoming sky looked like it was filled with clouds, or aurora, pockets of heat that bubbled and swirled—

_Tobias is exposed, he’s the only thing up there, tell him to get out of there—_

‹Tobias. Marco here. Maybe time to find cover? Over.›

_What’s with this MAYBE that’s not how you talk when you’re trying to keep somebody from getting themselves KILLED—_

‹Tobias here. You said he didn’t pay any attention to the animals in Vietnam, right? Over.›

_That was Vietnam, the place was CRAWLING with life, you’re the ONLY BIRD IN THE SKY RIGHT NOW—_

‹Marco. That—that’s correct. I’m just getting a little jittery down here, over.›

‹Five minutes. Tobias, this is Jake. I’m with Marco—no point taking extra risks. Head for that pine on the south side, the one that’s a few trees back from the edge of the clearing. Over.›

‹Roger.›

The voice was resigned, skeptical—but he’d agreed. I flicked my tongue, tasting the dry mountain air. Tobias in the trees, David in the bushes, Jake out in the middle, me as backup with quick-strike capability.

The Visser—one Andalite body with who knew how many deadly alien morphs, plus four Dracon beams and a utility belt with a dozen different gadgets, not to mention a bonus prize that might do almost literally anything—

 _Calm the fuck down,_ I told myself.

But all my brain produced in response was an image of a pair of dice, tumbling over and over, with a sound like thunder.

‹Four and a half.›

I was waiting for the calm to come over me—the peace, the sense of inevitability, the feeling of having done the hard part, having stepped out into open space and being in free fall. But it hadn’t happened yet—still felt like there was time to think, room to take action, we weren’t past the point of no return, if we died and it was because of something I _could_ have thought of it would be all my fault—

‹Four.›

Six Chee. Judging by what I’d seen Erek do, six Chee could probably crumple the Visser’s ship up like it was newspaper.

 _Or they could crumple_ us.

I shifted again, nervous energy running up and down my six-foot spine. That was just stupid, it was stupid to worry about the Chee suddenly turning violent when there were plenty of _real_ things that could lead to disaster just fine—

‹Three and a half.›

 _Maybe Telor_ did _know about Serenity—maybe they infiltrated Atlas Labs, or they had somebody at Edwards, or they just figured it out, and the Visser knew, too, because_ he _was spying on_ them _, so he knows we know and he knows we just blew it up, he’s ready for us, he knows that now’s the moment—_

‹Three.›

It was because there’d never _been_ a countdown before—that was why I was spiraling out so hard, why I couldn’t settle. There’d always been uncertainty, right before go time—always a bit of panic, a bit of second-guessing. But there’d never been _one moment_ when it would all come to a head, one moment when we might all just die—

‹Two and a half.›

 _I’m sorry, Jake,_ I thought, the words forming in my head just shy of the conveyor belt that would turn them into thought-speak, that would carry them out into the world where there would be effects, and consequences. _If this all goes south—_

 _Something is wrong,_ another part of me thought. _Something is off, I’m_ too _freaked out, there has to be some reason, something I picked up on without realizing it, what is it, what’s the key—_

‹Two.›

_Bail. Now._

It was an almost irresistible impulse—irresistible except for the fact that _everything_ should be resistible, you could never be one hundred percent sure, it felt like it would be wrong to give in without knowing why—

 _Wrong enough that you’d rather_ die?

I started to form the thought—

‹Tobias here. I think I see it.›

_Too late._

For a moment, everything seemed to fall away—all thought, all emotion. An infinite silence, stretching out and out and out—

‹Yeah. Coming in from the east. Definitely a cloaked ship. Coming in slow, like David described.›

_Slow so as not to make sounds, not to leave a contrail in the clouds that a cloaking device couldn’t hide—_

But there _were_ no clouds, something about it didn’t fit—

 _Shut up and_ focus—

‹Original ETA is one minute. Get ready, everybody.›

I peered skyward again, searching through the swirls of infrared for a blob of hidden heat—

_FLASH._

A burst of light, somehow _solid_ seeming, as if I hadn’t really seen it but instead been _hit_ by it, my vision whiting out in response.

‹What the—›

_FLASH-FLASH-FLASH._

Three more bursts, close together like someone knocking on a door.

‹Jake—›

‹Marco—›

_F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-FLASH._

‹Shit. _Shit!›_

‹Jake, what—›

‹The Chee. The Chee are down, Jake’s out in the open—›

_What—_

No.

‹Run,› I said.

I didn’t shout. There was no room for panic; shouting wouldn’t do any good.

_VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV._

‹What was—›

‹I’m demorphing!›

‹Tobias? What?›

‹I’m demorphing and it’s not me! It’s—it’s happening by itself!›

I felt a wave of choking horror and started to move—

It was happening to me, too.

I could feel it, feel my body slowing, thickening, my human form beginning to swell out of the snake’s thin shape.

‹Tobias, _get down from there while you still can—›_

‹David—›

‹Me, too—›

‹ _—hide,_ stay out of sight— _Jake, are you clear?›_

‹N—no, I—›

I could feel the despair in his voice like a knife in my chest.

_We’re dead._

‹I can’t get out. There—there’s a force field.›

‹The Chee,› I shouted. ‹What happened to the Chee?›

‹They’re—they fell, they’re frozen, they’re frozen and their holograms are off, I think they’re completely shut down—›

‹Jake, _where are you?›_

‹I’m at the northwest corner, I’m—›

The thought cut off abruptly—

_—he’s fine, it’s the demorphing, he just lost thought-speak, that’s all, he’s alive, he’s fine—_

A part of me seemed to shake its head sadly.

I pushed myself up onto hands and knees—onto the _stubs_ of my hands and knees, my body unsteady, the limbs still pushing their way out of what was left of the cobra, the skin still black and mottled brown. Lifting my head, I looked up into the sky—

_Death._

That was the word that flashed across my mind, as the cloaking field faded away and the ship came into view, a hundred feet above the grassy meadow. It was huge—bigger than a Bug fighter, bigger than Elfangor’s ship, a shape like a medieval battle-ax with two giant, curved wings, the whole thing painted black as night—

I felt the air around me turn solid, my whole body suddenly squeezed by pressure as if I’d been teleported a mile below the surface of the ocean. There was a jerk, and I was flying forward, my feet dragging across the weeds and brambles, my arms held out stiff like a scarecrow.

_Oh god oh god oh god—_

My mind was splitting, tearing in two, one half a gibbering mess of raw, nuclear panic while the other was suddenly cold and distant, as if watching myself from the outside—as if it were some kind of math problem in school, _oh that’s interesting—_

Die. I was going to die.

I couldn’t turn my head, but out of the corner of my eye I could see Tobias being dragged forward, too, russet feathers still disappearing into his skin, his eyes bulging in terror. We were being pulled toward the center, the dark shadowy place directly beneath the hovering ship, where there were already three bodies waiting—

_Jake._

And—

It was just like Jake had said. Erek and Rictic were slumped, lying face first in the dirt, their limbs splayed out at awkward angles, like suits of armor that had been kicked over—

They didn’t look asleep. They looked dead.

“Jake,” I started to say, as the force dragging me forward lightened and slowed,as I saw David floating in from the other side of the clearing. “Jake, I’m—”

And then the world unfolded.

_HOW?_

It was like the inside of a dream, a dream where I was god and could see everything— _everything,_ inside and out and past and future, see every part and particle as well as every whole, an infinity of possibility charted out along infinite timelines, arranged in infinite space—

_LEERAN HYPERSIGHT._

They weren’t words. It wasn’t thought-speak. The knowledge was simply _there,_ had always been there, took no time at all to be understood—although even as I understood it, I _saw_ myself understanding it, and saw myself seeing myself, and saw myself seeing that, as well, a recursive chain, a billion Marcos and each aware of every other—

—just as I was aware of—

_VISSER—_

_JAKE—_

_TOBIAS—_

_DAVID—_

It was all too much, more information than my brain could hold, than _any_ brain could hold, memory and presence and premonition all swirling and blending together. I wasn’t even terrified anymore—there wasn’t _room_ for terror. I wasn’t afraid, wasn’t angry, wasn’t happy, wasn’t _anything._ I was a conduit, hollow and vast and infinitely thin, and the entire universe was flowing through me, every bit being read at once, every bit being read in order, everything that had ever happened all in a row one after another and all of it compressed down into a single, endless moment.

There was a conversation, between the five of us, and it had already been had, and it had always been happening, and it had ended a thousand times, and always the same way, and the horror that I’d felt at the end of it had already echoed across time and space, was filling me completely even though it hadn’t actually begun—

_YES. THIS IS THE END FOR YOU._

It was the end, it was the beginning, it was the truth that underscored and permeated every facet of my being, and Jake’s being, and Tobias’s, and David’s—

David. His betrayal crashed over me like a tidal wave— _I had to—_ even as it was obvious that he _hadn’t_ had to, that he simply didn’t _care_ , had _never_ cared, and I could see it, the moment that it had all become possible, such a tiny slip, I had _seen_ it, the darkness inside him, the festering rot, it would have been my fault, I would have felt guilt but the knowledge had been _taken_ from me, erased from memory, it had happened _on purpose,_ someone had _done this to us—_

_HOW?_

An online auction, a little blue box for sale—as soon as we'd decided to stay, decided to  _die,_  he'd begun looking for another way out, another way off, _anything_ to make it through the next three weeks, how could we be willing to just  _sit_  there and do  _nothing,_  just let the end come without fighting it—

And alongside it, alongside and above and within the fear and rage and confusion I saw David’s fate unfurling before me, the history of the future, and I screamed alongside him, it couldn’t end like that, it couldn’t, not after _everything else—_

 _I’M EXTREMELY INTERESTED IN BUYING YOUR LITTLE BLUE BOX._ _TELL ME THE BEST OFFER YOU’VE RECEIVED SO FAR AND I’LL DOUBLE IT._

And after that—

_VISSER THREE—IT’S ME, IT’S DAVID, PLEASE DON’T GO, PLEASE DON’T SHOOT, DON'T REACT, THEY'RE HERE, THEY'RE WATCHING—_

And before—

_I DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE THE BLUE BOX. BUT I CAN GET IT TO YOU, AND I CAN GET YOU THE ANIMORPHS TOO._

Laughter, black laughter—

_SOME PROMISES ARE WORTH KEEPING, LITTLE HUMAN, AND SOME ARE NOT._

And it happened, the Yeerk pouring into David’s ear as he screamed, not again, this couldn’t be happening _again—_

And it wasn’t, not yet. We were still at the beginning of the conversation, and David’s fate still lay in the future—the distant, unreachable future, an infinity away—

There was a creature named David, and he screamed as his father lifted a can of gasoline.

There was a creature named Jake, and he threw _scissors scissors rock paper rock rock rock paper_ and his brother chased him into a closet and trapped him there.

There was a creature named Tobias, and he looked up from his creaking, ancient bunk bed to see a tiny, scrawny kid with a stained t-shirt pulled all the way up over his face.

There was a creature named Marco, and his mother was taken, taken up into the sky, her sailboat left to drift until it crashed onto the rocks.

There was a creature named Alloran, and the other children gathered around him, pushing on him, _pushing,_ pushing with their minds, pushing him to _believe_ , and the truth inside him crumpled and shrank, collapsing down to a tiny point as dense as a neutron star, and then it _burst._

There was a creature named Esplin, and it wanted desperately to be allowed to live.

There was a creature named Marco, and it _wrenched_ its mind up out of the loop, lifted its eyes from the glitter of tiny crystals and turned up toward the vast, drifting planets—

 _THERE IS NO ESCAPE,_ said the Visser, and it was true—they could _see_ that it was true, see the map laid out before them, see that no rescue ever came, that no rescue was even _possible._

Of course, the knowledge did not stop them from trying, even as they knew in their bones that it was futile. They were _bound_ to try, conscripted by history, compelled by the laws of time. They would break, and despair, but first they would struggle and fight, because that was how it went, how it had already gone a thousand times, how it would go a thousand more.

There was a creature named Marco, and it struggled to remember itself—to separate itself from the Visser, who it had always been, and David who it had always been, and Jake, who it had always been, and Tobias, who it had always been, and Marco, who it had always been—

_Wait._

There was confusion, but it folded before the revelation—

_SO THE CHEE HAVE THE CUBE, THEN._

There was laughter, and triumph, and wild, desperate fear, the lines mixing and blending in subtle symmetry—for the Chee had already been bought, it was within the Visser’s power to give them everything they had ever wanted, and they would _know_ that it was true, for it already _was_ true—they would sell the Earth for their true heart, their true purpose, the dogs that they would do all within their power to keep alive.

And yes, Rachel and Tom and Garrett and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill needed to die—

—the creature named Tobias screamed, as it had already been screaming, as it would always scream—

—but they were as nothing, next to the cube. Distractions, irritants, tiny flaws in an infinite perfect sphere. Their guard would be down. They would be easily dispatched. It would not even require his _direct_ attention, given the tools at hand, they had earplugs but not _all_ of them—

—the creature named David screamed, as it had already been screaming, as it would always scream—

—yes, that would do nicely, the clones were not ready for the sharing but one of them would suffice for this. He would send a copy of himself, wearing the body of David Poznanski, and in the meantime the Chee would bring him the cube and there would be infinite dogs, dogs forever, paws and tails and flopping ears stretching off into the distant future—

—the creature named Jake was watching in horror, was reaching, reaching, reaching, trying to reach Marco, to touch, to comfort, to reassure— _it’s going to be okay_ —the lie reflected upon itself, not okay, none of this was okay, _how could they have my MOTHER—_

There was laughter from the Visser.

There was shock from the Visser, sheer and utter shock.

 _YOU FOOLS,_ a voice whispered, the words echoing through eternity. _HOW COULD YOU IGNORE IT? HOW COULD YOU NOT_ SEE _IT?_

But of course they hadn’t noticed, didn’t have the _pieces,_ the _perspective_. They did not know that you could not stop time, that _nothing_ could stop time, that time was written into the fabric of the universe, that if something _seemed_ to stop time it must absolutely be pretending, even a god could not do it, even a god that stepped out of thin air, its skin glowing faintly blue beneath long white hair, eyes that sparkled with the light of the stars—

The memory, the _memory_ was what proved it—in morph, always in morph, he had been in morph when his memory had been changed, they had been in morph when time had stopped, it was a fraud, all a fraud, Seerow had not created the emulator, could not _possibly_ have created it—could not in a thousand years have produced the computation required for even a single morph. The computer had _already_ existed, had merely been _tapped,_ repurposed—with every morph they entered _its_ domain, placed themselves under _its_ control, their very minds written into its software, it knew everything they knew and more, it had been watching them, reading them, and it could make them _see_ things, make them _think_ things, make them _do_ things, he would never morph again they would never morph again he shuddered to think how many times he had placed himself within its power—

_YES. THIS IS THE END FOR YOU._

The black god, the mad puppetmaster, they had _seen_ it, or at least its avatar, and now so many things made sense—there was a fountain of joy, joy spouting from the heart of the universe, joy sparkling across all of time and space, he had never expected to find _this_ revelation in the minds of mere human children, he knew where his enemy _was_ , now, it was obvious—

Revelation.

Revelation.

Revelation…

_A PROPHECY, YOU SAY? IT DID NOT DO MUCH FOR CASSIE WITHERS, I SEE._

The creature named Marco screamed, as it had already been screaming, as it would always scream, because that face should not have been there, it _should not have been there,_ he reached deep into the heart of the Visser and what he found was _impossible—_

She had been taken, she was one of _them,_ and the Visser was going to _kill_ her—

_YOUR MOTHER?_

_BUT OF COURSE—_

_OF COURSE SHE WOULD BE._

_HOW COULD SHE NOT?_

The creature named Jake was broken, was broken into ten billion pieces but still it tried, the shards tried to pull themselves together, to wrap around the wound that had torn itself into Marco, the knife plunging all the way into his heart, she was _alive_ but there was nothing he could do, he couldn’t _save_ her—

_YES. THIS IS THE END FOR YOU._

They were closer now, to the prophesied conclusion—were halfway through the dance, the pages of the script drifting into the fire, half of the secrets had been learned—

_HOW?_

The dance, the dance, the dance, ten thousand million billion trillion puppets all twitched into place, the Skrit Na had taken his mother _two years ago,_ she had been trapped the whole time, screaming, but he was dead, he couldn’t help her, the creature named Marco had already died, that was how the conversation ended, how it ended every time, there was no way out and no escape—

 _I JUST DIDN’T WANT TO DIE,_ said David.

 _I JUST DIDN’T WANT TO DIE,_ said the Visser.

But only one of them would succeed, only one of them had solved the mystery, found the key, soon he would spread throughout the galaxy, would consume Telor, would consume the Earth, would consume _all_ , all except the Arn and the dogs, it was close, so close, and the cube was not even necessary but it would simplify so many things, bring the end closer, but he knew too that he would never use it, for it was too dangerous—a conduit to the gods, the pathway to their heart—

_Pathway?_

_A MARVELOUS JOKE._

They had had everything they needed, to put all of the pieces together—Serenity only functioned because the system had been surrounded by a rift, a magnificent rift, the work of the gods themselves, a vast expanse of slowtime across which all things moved at a crawl, unless they traveled along the bridge—

But the bridge was not made for the Andalite’s rock, the Andalite’s rock was doomed to fail, would be caught like a fly in honey, there had never _been_ a threat, he had told the Chee immediately but they had not aided him as well as he had hoped, had been willing to betray him here, and for that, perhaps, he would punish them, would extract satisfaction from them, and they would _let_ him, for the sake of the dogs—

_There never was any chance the Andalites could blow up the planet._

All of their panic and desperation, all of their haste and concern, Tyagi’s strategy of appeasement and capitulation, it had all been unfounded, unnecessary, built on a foundation of wrong assumptions. The Visser laughed, dark and empty laughter—again, as so many times before, he had plotted and schemed and carefully maneuvered, trying to nudge the pieces into place as if they were intelligent, never certain when he might meet resistance, and now he found that he could have simply _lied_ , could have just _claimed_ there was an extraplanetary threat, and the result would have been the same. It was all a trap, a trap _meant_ to draw them here, to their fate, to their doom, they had marched inexorably along a path of puppets, of fools, and they had given the Visser the Chee to play with, and now he would unlock all of their secrets, their technology—

_MARCO, CALM DOWN—MARCO, HOLD IT TOGETHER, AT LEAST SHE’S ALIVE, AS LONG AS SHE’S ALIVE THERE’S STILL HOPE—_

But there was no hope. The conversation had ended, and only David and the Visser had walked away, and the Visser was going to _kill_ her, she had already been in his way and this made it all the sweeter. They had failed, a thousand times they had failed, and now they were going to die as they always did, and there was nothing they could do about it.

—the creature named Marco screamed, as it had already been screaming, as it would always scream, but only for a little while longer—

The stream shifted again, the feeling of a claw digging through flesh, a dragon seeking a bauble within its treasures.

_THERE IS ANOTHER ONE?_

Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill and Temrash three-one-three, they were back on the mesa, Tom and Jake and Tobias and Garrett and Rachel and Marco and Ax, and the Visser was with them, climbed _inside_ with them, saw—

He saw—

The beginning of a new ending, a possibility to match his own, not one but _two—_

That possibility, he must end at once.

The challenger, the interloper, the upstart, the harbinger of doom, the Andalites must not know, the Yeerks must not know, it was _obvious_ but they were all so stupid, none of them could _see_ if he could just keep their eyes away for a little while longer—

He could not send Telor. Telor had betrayed him already, could no longer be trusted in any matter of import—

_AH, YES. THIS ONE WILL DO._

It was time—the time they had all seen coming, the time that meant the beginning of the end. He stunned the creature David, stunned it and drew it upward, upward into the hold where he was waiting, where _it_ was waiting, there were a thousand of him and now there would be one more, David and Esplin, Esplin and David, they would go forth and they would kill Aximili, erase his possibility, there would _never_ be another like Esplin and in the meantime he would seize the _cube,_ the cube was the key to all of it, had always been, past and present and future—

—the creature named David screamed—

—their thoughts and feelings were like a book, held out in front to be read, the words dancing with light and life, but there was nothing to stop him from looking further, digging deeper, pulling other books off the shelves at will, and he dove into the mind of the Visser, searching frantically for something, anything—anything he could use, anything they could use to fight, to resist, to escape, there had to be _some_ way out if only he could just _find_ it—

And there—

—in a place so far from Earth that his mind could not fathom the distance, the sheer enormity of space and time and reality—

—the image of a face, smug and triumphant, wielding the power of status and politics, a vile worm with no vision, concerned only for its own place, and it wore the face of his mother—

_HOW?_

_HOW?_

_HOW?_

The word echoed through the five of them, crawling its way back to the beginning of the dance, doubling and tripling and seeping into everything else as everything else seeped into it. It was impossible, inconceivable, the pain of it striking him along every fault, buffeting every nerve, of all the ways he had thought the universe could be cruel he had never, _could_ never, could not in a thousand years have imagined _this,_ it was as if the gods themselves had singled him out for punishment, things like this just didn’t happen by _accident._

His mother was Visser One.

His mother was Visser One, and Visser Three was going to kill her.

_JUST COME OUT AND—AND DO SOMETHING, WHATEVER IT IS YOU’VE BEEN DOING, ONLY DON’T SHOOT, DON’T LEAVE, IF THEY THINK THEY CAN CATCH YOU, IF THEY THINK THEY CAN CATCH YOU THEY’LL TRY, AND YOU CAN CATCH THEM INSTEAD._

But of course, he would never let them _see_ what he’d been doing. There would have to be a deception, a ruse, and it would have to be plausible, there was an Andalite among them—

 _IT’S THEIR OWN FAULT,_ whispered the creature named David as Esplin poked and probed and slithered inside, touching him in his very core, a deep and tender caress—

 _IT’S ALL RIGHT,_ whispered the Visser. _WE WILL KILL THEM TOGETHER, AND THEN THERE WILL ONLY BE ONE, AND THAT ONE WILL BE ALL._

And with his next-to-last breath, the creature named Marco wished desperately that it could be different, could have _been_ different, that he could have caught the mistake, found the switch and flipped it, moved them from _here_ to _there,_ he had to _save_ her and in order to do that he had to _live—_

But you couldn’t go backwards in time, you could only get it right the _first_ time, and the god had already done that, had seen the switch and chosen its position, all was unfolding as the Ellimist desired.

The creature named David screamed, and the creature named Marco screamed with it, and the creatures named Tobias and Jake screamed also, and the creature named the Visser laughed as he drew them close, drew them close until they lay within his shadow, a shadow that stretched out, limitless, across the cosmos.

_YES. THIS IS THE END FOR YOU._

_I’m sorry, Mom,_ whispered the creature named Marco.

And then there was nothing.

 


	44. Chapter 33: Rachel

** Chapter 33: Rachel **

 

‹Success,› Ax called from the cockpit. ‹The trace is faint, but definitive—we’re picking up helium-4 leaking into the atmosphere.›

I let go of the trigger, and the twin pillars of light vanished from the display. “Roger,” I said. “Are we out, then?”

‹Up and away.›

The image on the screen was a mess of dust and smoke; without the superimposed wireframe it would’ve been impossible to see the smooth, narrow shaft that the Dracon beams had burned through the main building. The frame shifted as the ship turned and began to rise, widening just enough for me to catch a glimpse of the three-hundred-or-so people gathered in clumps and clusters outside of the facility before we accelerated away and the whole thing was replaced by a stream of mottled green.

At least two thirds of those people had been wearing military uniforms. I wasn’t sure how many of them had been Chee—Kodep had absolutely insisted on having Chee on hand to enforce the evacuation, in case the lab staff didn’t believe us—but even so, that still probably made this the largest concentration of military personnel in this half of the state.

We’d been worried that the government might have taken full possession of the base—Ax had estimated that even with most of the distance being a hollow elevator shaft, it would still take at least thirty seconds to burn all the way through to the actual detector, and we weren’t sure whether the fighter’s shields could withstand a full barrage for that long—

But it looked like Tyagi had decided to go the quiet route, so as not to draw the Yeerks’ attention—there had been no choppers, no tanks, no fighter jets, no surface-to-air missiles. At least, none that the soldiers had been able to deploy in the ninety seconds since we sent our warning—without a hyperdrive and with the cannons on standby, there had been nothing for Serenity to detect until we dropped down to helicopter height and Tom and Garrett started morphing. Ninety seconds for the approach, another minute for the Chee to finish clearing the building—start to finish, the entire op had taken less than four minutes.

Setting the cannons to standby mode, I turned to see Tom and Garrett rising up from the floor, Tom still sporting feathers, Garrett still the wrinkly grey beige of a tardigrade. They’d been our backup weapons—Tom in case anyone tried to pull a Bard-at-Laketown, and Garrett in case we had to land in a hurry and needed some wide-area defense.

But there’d been no need in the end. The op had gone as smoothly as any we’d ever done—smoother than the truck, even.

 _Yep,_ whispered Marco’s voice in the back of my head. _One of the many perks of treachery._

 _We didn’t hurt anyone,_ I countered. _And it had to be done._

‹Aircraft inbound,› Ax called out. ‹Four. High-speed. Human.›

“Are they going to be a problem?”

‹No. We’re cloaked, and they’re not reacting to our movements. Looks like they’re heading for the base, ETA ninety seconds.›

_And now that Serenity’s down—_

It hadn’t been just for our sake, to stay off the government’s radar. It had been for the sake of _everyone_ —for every ship the human race managed to steal or reverse-engineer, every beam weapon we were able to build, every one of the thousand morphers Tobias and Garrett had created. They’d all been on record—all been traceable, all been vulnerable. Serenity had been built into a mountainside—couldn’t have been moved or hidden—and with the Yeerks’ technological superiority, that meant it absolutely could not have been defended.

All it would’ve taken was one breach. And if we’d waited until we _knew_ it had been compromised—

“What was the last ETA on Visser Three?” Tom asked, his voice like rocks tumbling across sandpaper as his throat continued to rearrange itself.

‹Nine minutes,› Ax answered. ‹Seven minutes, forty-five seconds, now.›

I glanced out through the front viewport, at the thinning sky and the rapidly shrinking mountains. It had taken us twenty-six minutes to make the trip to Atlas Labs after dropping Jake and the others off in Montana—eight minutes to reach low earth orbit, ten minutes in the void, and eight minutes to brake and reenter. With any luck, they would already be done by the time we landed at the rendezvous point.

 _It’s really happening,_ I thought. _In another half hour, the war could be—_

Not _over,_ probably. Not yet. The Yeerks still had enough firepower to level every city on the planet, and the Andalites were still a threat—

—although Ax had patched into the Andalite civilian network again, and he said that the fear of reprisals was rising, that more and more of the population was taking Elfangor’s broadcast seriously—

—but different. Things would undoubtedly change, if we managed to take the Visser off the board. Without him to goad them, Telor would probably move toward a peaceful cease-fire, especially if Tyagi followed through on the offer to set up voluntary infestation. There were only a quarter million Yeerks in the whole invasion force, after all—even if all of the volunteers came from the United States, that was still less than one in a thousand people, and there had to be that many people who were depressed or addicted or homeless or psychotic or on death row or whatever who would jump at the chance.

And then there was the cube, and the cloaking device, and the Dracon beams, and the repulsorlift—all of the technological advances that were currently on pause while the government played everything close to the chest, they could all come out if we managed to turn the tide—

I took a deep breath. A part of me was stirring, a part that had been growing louder and louder lately—the part that held the memory of Jordan and Sara, that carried Cassie and Mom and Dad and Uncle Steve and Aunt Jean and Melissa Chapman—that part had risen up in objection, full of anger and indignation—

 _You can’t just—just let it go like that, let it_ end _like that, you can’t let them get_ away _with it, they have to_ pay—

I squeezed my eyes shut, visualizing their faces, one after another—Sara’s gap-toothed smile, the mole on Jordan’s cheek that she was so self-conscious about, the way Cassie’s eyes would light up whenever Jake walked into a room. I played the list in my head, rehearsing the memories, the memorial that was all I had left of them—of _any_ of them.

Mom’s sigh, and the way a few strands of hair would always manage to slip themselves out of her pony tail, the way she would brush them back behind her ear whenever she turned the page of one of her briefs.

My trip to Disney Land with Dad last year, when he’d put me up on his shoulders to see the fireworks—I was twelve, _way_ too big, he’d ended up twinging his back and he’d needed an icepack on the flight home, but he’d still called me his little monkey, had made me feel like I didn’t weigh anything as he swung me up in his arms.

Melissa’s dress, on the night of our first school dance—

Uncle Steve, teaching me how to play chess at the family reunion at Lake Tahoe—

Aunt Jean’s black belt test—

Too many, there were too many of them, too many faces and too many memories, friends and coaches and teachers and neighbors. I felt my anger cooling as I rehearsed them, recited them, but it didn’t go away—just transformed, the magma spreading out, thickening into a bleak, black sadness.

_Not fair._

It wasn’t fair, that they were dead—that they’d been tortured, some of them, that the last days of their lives had been filled with horror and then been cut short. It wasn’t fair that I was alive, when they weren’t—that I had been given the power to fight, to protect myself, when they hadn’t.

_Never, ever forget—_

And I wouldn’t.

But at the same time—

At the same time, it wasn’t right to think that things would never be okay again. For a part of me to _insist_ that they would never be okay again, to treat any possibility of peace or progress or forgiveness as betrayal. That piece of me—it was standing up for something right and good and true, it was protecting something important—something I desperately wanted not to lose—but it was wrong about _how_ to protect that thing, like how our bodies crave sugar because they evolved to think that sugar meant fruit, meant vitamins and minerals and fiber, not just empty calories, Coach Aikin had explained it to me once—that piece of me that wanted to rage and destroy, to make them pay, it was _wrong_ about how the world worked, about what it would mean for there to be such a thing as justice, it didn’t understand about _prices,_ about _consequences_ , any more than my sweet tooth knew about diabetes.

 _At some point, somebody has to be willing to_ not _get everything they deserve, or it’ll all just keep going around and around forever._

I wasn’t sure where that perspective had come from. It felt new, like it didn’t quite fit me—

_Maybe morphing Marco all the time is starting to rub off on you._

—but it felt _right_ , that realization. That I didn’t have to have just one bucket for everything that had happened, didn’t have to round it all off to one single number, plus or minus—that I could _acknowledge_ that all of the terrible things had, in fact, been terrible, and still hang onto my hope, still have the ability to imagine a tomorrow that was brighter than today even if it didn’t have my sisters or my parents in it. It was the same cliché that I’d seen in a thousand different books, a thousand different movies— _if they could see you now, do you think they’d want you to be angry, want you to be tormented—_ but I’d never really understood it until now.

Sometimes, the best thing you could do was just draw a line and say, _no more._

It hurt, to realize that. To really _feel_ it, really let it land—that maybe any attempt to balance the scales would make things worse, that there might not be any justice out there for us to find, that all of the fair answers might really be impossible, might not actually exist. That maybe _nobody_ would be punished for what had happened to Sara and Jordan, to Cassie and her parents, to all of Ventura.

It was the same kind of gut-punch as when they told you Santa wasn’t real, only a thousand times worse. But realizing it, _recognizing_ it—

It was better than the alternative. Made _me_ better. It meant that—when the time came—I would know to put down the sword. Would know that I _could_ put down the sword, that there was nothing forcing me to keep holding it. That I wouldn’t be the one who kept everything from changing, from ending.

‹Two more minutes,› Ax said, punctuating my stream of thought.

We were almost fully in space, now, the sky coal-black even with the sun shining bright in the viewport. Ax had oriented the ship at right angles to the planet, so that the America was a vast wall to the right, tan and green and the gray of cities.

“’Scuse me,” Garrett said, slipping past me and sliding into the copilot’s seat beside the open space where the Andalite was standing, one hand stretching out to bury itself in his fur. I glanced over my shoulder, and there was Tom, too, leaning against the bulkhead, all four of us looking out at the view.

“Smoke’s finally clearing,” Tom pointed out quietly.

It was true. We weren’t anywhere near high enough to actually see California, but the ashy gray haze that had choked the sky for so long was nowhere to be seen, the clouds clean and white, the open spaces between them crystal clear.

“Took long enough,” I said.

Tom was silent for a moment, and then, even quieter—

“What do we do if they don’t make it?”

I felt a tightening in my chest, and without even thinking—

“Like we said. Wait at the rendezvous point for an hour, and then we bail.”

_Stalling, eh?_

I shot another glance at Tom, trying to keep my expression neutral. I hadn’t _been_ him nearly as often as I’d been Marco—just the once, on the mesa—but I’d known him my entire life, and I was pretty sure that I hadn’t answered the question he was really asking.

His face was blank, but tight, his eyes pointed past me at the viewport. A mask, put on on purpose. “You know what I mean,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

_Don’t forget, he’s been you, too._

I sighed. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t thought that far ahead, really.”

There was a part of me that was resentful, that wanted to object, to complain. But—

 _If anything happens,_ Jake had said. _If the_ worst _happens, and none of us make it back from this—_

He’d looked at each of the four of us in turn, me and Tom and Garrett and Ax, and I’d known it was coming.

 _If things go south, it’s going to take all four of you. And somebody’s going to have to call the shots. Somebody that all three—that all_ four _of you trust._

“Maybe you should,” Tom said.

‹One minute to original ETA.›

I grimaced. “Yeah,” I said. “Probably.”

I looked back out the window, at the slow spin of the planet next to us. I wasn’t used to this—to being on the sideline, sitting and thinking and waiting while someone else took the shot.

But when the target was Visser Three—

_I should’ve fought harder. I should’ve gone instead of Jake._

In theory, the presence of the Chee removed the need for muscle, and what the mission called for was smarts. But still.

 _Wasted motion,_ my shoulder Marco whispered. _Nothing you can do about it now. Tom’s question, on the other hand…_

Okay. If they didn’t come back—

The asteroid was still priority one. Even if the odds were dropping, thanks to Marco’s broadcast, they were odds of _total annihilation_ , which meant they dwarfed pretty much everything else. That was why Tyagi had been willing to send her clone straight to Telor—she’d been hedging against the worst case, and if the Yeerks _did_ decide to strip the planet, it would actually be _better_ if they could do it quickly and efficiently—

_We could go to the source. Get the hyperdrive back, take Ax and Temrash straight to the Andalite homeworld—_

Actually, Tyagi had probably already thought of that, too. They had at least three hyperdrives now, and that was without manufacturing any new ones, which they at least _might_ have been able to manage.

‹According to Serenity’s original estimate, the Visser’s ship should be landing now.›

I could feel it, within me—the impulse to go, to do, to attack—to direct Ax to take the ship straight to where the Visser was landing, fire on it from above—

But it wasn’t March anymore, and I was no longer that Rachel. If we’d really caught him unprepared, four Animorphs and six Chee would be plenty, and if we _hadn’t_ —if he was ready for them—then one Bug fighter wasn’t going to make a difference.

“How long until we reach the rendezvous point?” I asked.

‹Sixteen minutes.›

I sucked in a breath, held it, let it partway out.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get set.”

 

*        *        *

 

‹Tom here. I’m in position, no bogeys. Garrett, you can demorph. Over.›

I twisted one stalk eye to track Garrett as he dove toward the ground and kept the other on its slow swivel. I could see maybe two hundred feet in every direction in the sparse woods, and I swept around a full three hundred and sixty degrees every three seconds or so. That meant that anything that surprised me would have to be moving at least forty-five miles per hour—

—without making a sound—

—and without being picked up by Ax, who was still on board the cloaked Bug fighter, ready for a quick takeoff—

—and without being visible to Tom, who was now tracing tight circles above the trees in the osprey morph he’d borrowed from Marco—

_Which rules out everything except, y’know, bullets and laser beams and rampaging Chee and stuff._

My paranoid shoulder Marco had a point, but I kept up the sweep. There wasn’t really any point in _not_ keeping an eye out, after all—

‹Ax says it’s been forty-nine minutes,› Garrett said, as he fluttered to the mulchy floor in front of me.

‹I know,› I replied, turning my main eyes to focus on him as I returned my other stalk to surveillance duty. I was wearing Ax’s body, after all, and the Andalite brain had an insanely accurate internal clock. ‹You think we should leave now?›

‹No.› The bird began to expand, swelling upward as Garrett returned to his normal body. ‹We said we’d stay for an hour. But I’m getting nervous.›

 _Me, too,_ I thought.

But Jake would never say that, so I didn’t, either.

‹They _are_ like forty miles away,› I reminded him. ‹And since they’re not coming back by Chee—›

It was one of the reasons we weren’t in the loop—if we’d had one of the Chee with us, we could’ve just asked for an update. But given that most of the _bad_ scenarios we’d thought of involved some kind of betrayal or defection by the ancient androids—

Of course, there was no real guarantee they weren’t already all around us. We’d done a few insect morphs right at the start, but not in the past twenty minutes, and Tom’s osprey couldn’t catch Chee holograms nearly as well as it could pick up on Yeerk ones. As far as _we_ knew, _they_ didn’t know what the rendezvous point was, but they might have some way of tracing us we didn’t know about—something Kodep had installed while he and Ax were sweeping the ship, maybe—

 _Atta girl,_ thought Marco’s voice in my head.

I ignored it.

‹Ninety seconds to demorph,› Garrett said, as his feathers began to clump together and shrivel into human fingers. ‹Ninety seconds to remorph. Forty minutes at sixty miles per hour plus three minutes means forty-three minutes. We’ve been waiting here for forty-nine-and-a-half minutes plus the sixteen minutes it took us to get here means that if they’re not here then things with Visser Three took at lea—›

His mental voice broke off as he passed the halfway mark, and he looked straight at me as his eyes softened from gold to brown. “At least twenty-two minutes and counting,” he said, his voice raspy and guttural like someone with bronchitis. “Most of the ways that that could take twenty-two minutes are not good.”

‹They may not have jumped him literally the second he got out of his ship,› I pointed out. ‹Look, I’m with you, but it’s too soon to panic—›

‹Tom here—›

‹Aximili here—›

‹Sorry—Ax, go ahead.›

‹Large life form, one hundred yards out, west-northwest. Moving slow—walking speed. Over.›

‹Tom here. Same report. It’s Jake, over.›

‹On foot?› I asked.

‹Yeah.›

 _And they just noticed him now?_ the voice of Marco wondered in my head.

‹Is he alone?› I asked Tom.

‹I don’t see anyone else.›

‹Keep your eyes on the sky, over.›

‹Roger.›

I rose up as high as I could, keeping only two limbs on the ground and leaning back onto Ax’s thick, muscular tail. I kept my stalks swiveling as I peered through the undergrowth with my main eyes—

There. Just emerging from the back side of a small hill, trudging through the leaves and brambles. He looked—

Tired? Preoccupied?

Not angry or sad or ruthlessly calm, anyway. He was moving fast, but not _hurried_ fast. Just—wanting-to-get-there fast.

“The others?” Garrett murmured, stepping forward to stand beside me, the last of his bird features melting away.

‹Tom and Ax didn’t see anybody.›

I heard the younger boy’s tiny intake of breath, saw his shoulders stiffen in reflex before he pushed them down deliberately, knew that somewhere inside his head he was reciting some rule or litany or promise.

‹Relax,› I said, even as I felt my own tension rising, tiny twin trickles of confusion and fear starting at the base of my neck and running down my spine. ‹He doesn’t look like it’s bad news.›

Garrett didn’t reply, just nodded tightly, his hands gripping the fabric of his jeans.

I dropped back down to all sixes, stepping forward as Jake cleared the nearest trees and raised a hand in greeting. “Hi, Ax,” he said. “Hi, Garrett.”

“Rachel,” Garrett whispered. “That’s Visser Three.”

Time seemed to stop.

_That’s—_

_—what?_

A part of me that was entirely separate from my thinking, reasoning brain took over, and I stepped smoothly forward—

_—Garrett’s face, rigid with fear, the blood draining away as if he’d seen a ghost—_

_—Jake had appeared as if from nowhere, alone, Ax and Tom hadn’t even detected him until he was a hundred yards away—_

—it had only been a blink of an eye, not even half a second, Jake’s hand was still only halfway lowered and my brain was still trying to find purchase—

—but the other part of me, the part that had absolute, unyielding faith in Garrett, that had been through fire and hell with the younger boy, that had promised Tobias I would watch his back—

—that part of me was already whipping my tail blade forward—

— _Jake’s eyes widened, but he didn’t move to dodge, didn’t try to block, with the last fraction of a second he plunged both hands into his pockets—_

I struck straight ahead, like a spear, the sliver of bone slicing through his sternum as if it were butter, burying itself deep in his chest.

There was a moment of open, gasping horror as I took in his face, _Jake’s_ face, saw his jaw go slack and his eyes glaze over—

— _oh god, oh god, what did I just—_

—and then he sagged, slumped, fell to his knees, and as his hands slipped out of his pockets I saw a flash, a glint of metal—

_Zzzzzzzzzzrp._

_“Rachel!”_ Garrett shouted, as my legs gave out from under me—as they _fell off of me_ , something had sliced—had cut—

“Rachel, demorph!”

There was a sound in the distance—a heavy, hollow _boom_ , followed by the unmistakable crackle of fire.

‹Garrett, _what—_ ›

“It was him!” Garrett screamed. “Rachel, demorph, you have to demorph _now—”_

‹Oh, god, Ax— _Ax! Are you—›_

The voices were tiny, tinny, far away, and I felt my vision clouding over as the blood poured from my Andalite body, dark stains mixing with the bright red still blossoming from my cousin’s chest.

 _You’re dying,_ Marco whispered. _Demorph. Now._

I tried to focus—

 _You have gold hair,_ whispered Marco, a Marco from a memory that I couldn’t quite place—was it real? Was it a morph? I had kissed him, once—or was that a dream—

_Shut up. Focus. You have gold hair. You have strong arms, strong hands, long legs. Your smile—when you smile, it looks like you have too many teeth. Focus, think about it, see yourself in the mirror—_

Too tall.

My chest—too big, it was so much harder to use the uneven parallel bars than it used to be, and my balance was all off—

_Sure, fine, whatever. Focus on that. Bring it back._

Something was changing. The gush of blood was slowing, blue fur withdrawing to reveal soft, pale skin—

_That’s right. Keep it up. Focus on you, pull it together._

The fog was lifting, slowly, as the morph proceeded. I realized that I could hear shouts in the distance, that I could smell smoke—

_Not yet. Think about that in a minute._

I heard a sliding, squelching, sucking sound, and I looked down to see my tail shrinking, the blade withdrawing from the—

—from Jake’s—

I shut my eyes.

_Keep going._

“Rachel! Help!”

I opened my eyes again—just the main eyes, my stalks were already gone as the morph crawled past halfway. There was a fire raging in the place where the Bug fighter had been, chunks of shrapnel surrounding a half-burned husk—

_Oh, god. Ax._

I shoved myself to my feet, my body still fluid and unstable. I looked down at the shape of—

_Dead._

Definitely dead.

_Not yet, deal with it later._

Turning, I staggered forward. I could see Garrett up above, standing in the shattered, open cockpit, surrounded by fire—

_He’s not in morph!_

—trying to move the limp, unconscious body of Ax, even from below I could see the blood, the singed fur, the ragged shape of a broken rib—

“Help!”

There was Tom, demorphing next to him, they were both too close to the fire, they were both, they were _all_ going to be burned—

I reached for my wrist, for the bracelet I’d taken off of the Visser at the high school, so long ago. It froze the air, maybe it could freeze the fire—

I spun the knobs, twisted the dials, trying to remember the settings that I’d figured out together with Ax, hours of experimenting to understand all of the combinations. Raising my arm, I pointed it toward the ship and pressed the main button—

_Thank god._

The fires around the cockpit froze, froze in place for a split second before fading, dying, vanishing, unable to reach the oxygen that swirled just outside of the field—

“Get him down!”

I ran up the ramp, turning the alien device on and off and on and off, shifting its field from place to place, clearing a path. There was one spot where the corridor was almost sealed shut, twisted metal leaving only a tiny path to crawl through, and the metal was hot, I could feel my hands blistering as they touched it, feel the searing heat in my knees, but I ignored the pain, shut it off, shut it away—

“Lower him over the side—”

“Rachel, can that thing—”

“Yeah, I think so, hang on—”

Twenty more confused, agonizing seconds and then he was down, we were all down, down on our knees on the scorched forest floor.

“What _happened—”_

“It was Visser Three, Visser Three in a Jake morph, or maybe it was just _Jake,_ I don’t know, but he threw some kind of—of—of homing bomb, I don’t know—”

_TSEWWWWW!_

I felt a strange tugging sensation in my abdomen, looked down to see a small, smoking hole, maybe a little bit wider than a quarter—

_“Oh god—”_

_“Look out—”_

I turned—somehow I turned, as I fell, was able to turn enough to see—

The body of Jake, still drenched in blood, but rising, standing, _shrinking,_ as the gaping hole in its chest flowed and smoothed over, as his features tightened and sharpened into—

Into—

_David?_

The nightmare figure pivoted, aiming its first Dracon beam at Tom even as a second one grew out of its other hand, as some kind of bandolier emerged from its chest—

_David, in morph?_

_TSEWWWWW! TSEWWWWW! TSEWWWWW!_

Tom and Garrett dove as the bright beams flashed out, dove and rolled in opposite directions, and I couldn’t see if either of them had been hit, could only watch as the nightmare stepped forward, pressing at a button on the bandolier and shimmering into glassy transparency—

_Stop it._

I had to stop it, had to stop him—

_TSEWWWWW! TSEWWWWW!_

I was facedown in the mulch, my arms and legs each weighing a thousand pounds, for the second time in two minutes there was blood leaking out of my body, it was my _real_ body this time, just as it had been Ax’s real body—

I pushed myself up onto my elbows and saw—

Saw—

_Garrett—_

The younger boy was down, had been carved from collarbone to rib as if by a lightsaber, his left arm three feet away from the rest of him—

_Stop it._

_TSEWWWWW! TSEWWWWW!_

There was still firing and that meant it wasn’t over, Tom wasn’t dead, if we could kill him we could fix it, we could fix all of it, there had to be a way to fix it—

I reached for the bracelet, my vision swimming.

_One to the left, open the sliders, flip the fourth lever—_

There were so many controls, I couldn’t quite remember how they all worked—

_TSEWWWWW! TSEWWWW!_

The timer. The green one was a timer, a delay, like taking a picture—

_TSEWWWWW!_

I spun the knob, pressed the button, and—with the last of my strength—threw it toward the almost-invisible shape.

_TSEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW—_

The shimmering crystal shape froze in place, the Dracon beam stuck in fire mode, a lance of pure light pouring out into the trees, fueling another inferno—

I blacked out, the darkness closing in around me, my vision narrowing to a point and then vanishing entirely as I dropped back to the forest floor. There was a moment of timeless nothingness, and then—

‹ _EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—›_

I jerked awake as the wave of shrieking thought crashed into me, washed over me, tumbled me like a high-tide undertow. There were sounds—shouts—the continuous noise of the Dracon beam—another explosion, smaller this time—

Silence.

_Hang on, Rachel. Focus—_

But I couldn’t. Not this time. Everything was swimming, everything was heavy and distant and foggy and clogged, it was all I could do to hang on to consciousness, to keep my eyes open against the million tons of force trying to drag them closed—

I felt hands around my face—gentle slaps—resolved the image of my cousin Tom out of the fog. I tried to speak, but nothing came out. Tom was shouting, but it was like I was underwater, like I was underwater and he was over the surface, I could hear that he was saying _something,_ but whatever it was I couldn’t make it out.

And then—

_Tobias?_

_That can’t be right,_ whispered some detached, empty part of me. _Tobias is—he’s—_

I didn’t finish the thought—couldn’t. Once more, the black fog choked my vision off to a point, snuffed it out. I couldn’t feel anything, see anything, could barely _think_ anything—

_Marco._

I remembered Marco.

Remembered a face, a voice, a smell, a smile—

 _Hang in there, Wonder Woman,_ the voice whispered. _It’s going to be o—_

 


End file.
